Re: Reasons for delay

[Henning Schulzrinne <hgs at cs.columbia.edu>]

Spencer Dawkins wrote:

> > (3) Exhaustion: Far too many drafts linger years in 90%-completed 
> > state, while the authors or the WG has moved on to other things. It 
> > would be interesting to take a look at long-delayed drafts and see how 
> > much they have really changed as a function of time. My guess is that 
> > the change rate goes towards one-sentence-per-month or less.
>
>
> Yes, and this interacts badly with document quality as community "best 
> practices" change over time - what was recommended two years ago may now 
> be deprecated, but most people don't notice the conflicts.

Plus, it becomes very difficult for authors and the WG to do context 
switches. Personally, I find it very difficult to work on a draft that I 
haven't looked at in a year - it takes a while to re-familiarize oneself 
with the issue, dig up old emails and not introduce new mistakes. This 
is exactly the same problem that some of us know from trying to debug 
our own code after a long absence.

This effect tends to be self-reinforcing: Knowing that it will be 
painful means that I'll be less likely to work on the draft.

> One of Keith's better suggestions was showing "external review" as a WG 
> deliverable. I don't know that this is required in all cases, but if an 
> AD says "and you need external review for this document", I would 
> believe that.

And this information should be captured somewhere.


> This interacts badly with (4). A number of IETF plenary presentations 
> have shown statistics like "half of the I-Ds were submitted within two 
> weeks of the I-D cutoff(s)". The resulting blizzard of text makes it 
> even less likely that any specific I-D will receive careful scrutiny 
> outside the WG (and, maybe, outside the list of authors).

On the other hand, I've heard from a WG chair that he doesn't schedule 
WGLCs except during that pre-cutoff time, as that's the only time people 
seem to be willing to read drafts and submit comments.



> One possible fix, easy to try - WGs seem to set their milestones based 
> on IETF meeting dates ("we'll do WGLC before Paris"). If WGs moved their 
> milestones a month earlier, WG chairs and ADs would have more 
> opportunities to notice problems and resolve them, and (one hopes) 
> milestone I-Ds would not get lost in the general onslaught at I-D cutoff 
> time.

The pre-scheduled WGLCs I suggested may help as well.


> (b) It's likely that at least some of the document authors stop caring 
> about their documents in any meaningful way, five years later, so this 
> can lead to further delays and AUTH48 confusion (I participated in an 
> AUTH48 process for a five-year-old Internet-Draft that generated 16 
> "final versions" and 142 e-mails between authors and the RFC-Editor).

Right - this then leads to tremendous pressure to "clean up" the draft 
in AUTH48, with very unsatisfying results for all parties.

In many cases, authors have changed companies and work fields in the 3-5 
year period. It's hard to get cycles out of an author that no longer 
works for a company that has any interest in the document topic.

> (a) As Lars-Erik points out - almost every one does WGLCs, but WGLCs are 
> not a mandatory part of the standards-track process. Do we actually need 
> to give WGs this freedom, especially for specifications that are 
> (theoretically) coming out of the WG?

I have yet to see a WG draft that did not receive a WGLC (or two...). I 
don't see the value of worrying too much about these oddities, or is 
there some philosophical objection to WGLC in some WGs?


> (b) In the SIP community, the WG chairs are rate-limiting the number of 
> active WGLCs at any given time, so something like Henning's suggestion 
> is already happening in some parts of the IETF.

Let's just say that bursts of enthusiasm and scheduling are followed by 
years of no pre-scheduled WGLCs. In general, I've found that the biggest 
problem of trying project management tools in the IETF is the 
predictable cycle:

(1) WG looks at charter - "Ohmygod - we're three years behind schedule".

(2) A burst of energy erupts, with a couple of WGLCs scheduled.

(3) We pat ourselves on the back.

(4) We go back to the familiar ways since the mechanisms, culture, 
supervision and tools don't exist to make this part of the standard 
operating procedure.

Henning






_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf at ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf