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What does “critical” mean? And how is it that the number of critical Launchpad bugs has leapt up to almost 300?

Until January, we reserved the critical importance for near-disastrous issues such as data loss; stuff that just about never happens.

This was fine except that it didn’t fully reflect what we in the Launchpad team consider to be really important. So now we also use critical for bugs where:

• there’s a crash: you see one of Launchpad’s oops reports and can’t do what you wanted
• a timeout occurs: Launchpad takes so long to do what you asked that our timeout system kicks in to prevent rogue requests from sapping resources
• a supported browser can’t run Launchpad’s Javascript
• there’s a regression: we accidentally break an existing feature.

The principle here is: just as Launchpad should never lose your data, nor should it stop you from doing something because of poor engineering.

So, our critical bug count has shot up to around 270 because we’ve expanded what we consider to be critical.

Another reason is that we’re getting tougher on timeouts. Obviously we don’t want Launchpad pages to be so slow that they time out.

So, over the past nine months we’ve repeatedly lowered our timeout limit, meaning that we uncover more and more slow-loading pages. Each time a new page hits the timeout limit, we report a new critical bug and work to fix it. We don’t lower the timeout again until we have the failure rate below 0.01% of requests.

Our aim is to have zero critical bugs at any time. Once we get there, Launchpad will have no oopses and no timeouts. People are already talking about how Launchpad is faster to use and that’s largely thanks to the performance effort that our Technical Architect, Rob Collins, has been driving. There’ll be more about this performance work in coming blog posts.

If there’s a down-side to this focus on critical bugs it’s this: the bug that’s important to you may not get fixed as quickly as you’d like. This isn’t because we don’t consider such bugs important but because we’ve decided that the most important bugs are those that stop you dead in your tracks.

If you’re interested in following the performance effort, or the work to tackle these critical bugs, join the launchpad-dev mailing list.

Thanks to Rob Collins for his help with this post.

Photo by Brian Searle. Licence: CC-BY.

Back in September, I asked for suggestions for featured projects for Launchpad’s front page.

As it’s been more than six months, and we have so many exciting projects in Launchpad, I think it’s time for a refresh. While all the projects featured on Launchpad’s front page are still doing great work, it’s only fair to give some others a turn in the spotlight 🙂

So, which projects do you want to see on the front page and why?

Photo by Adrián Pérez. Licence: CC-BY-SA.

Recently, Ursula and I have been improving the way that we test new Launchpad features.

Already, Launchpad has an extensive test suite but there are some things that automated tests can’t look out for. Rather than just testing the quality of our code, we also want to test the quality of the experience.

To do that, we’ve been doing more exploratory testing. Now, when a feature is getting close to deployment we will try out every part of the feature and make notes of anything in the experience that needs to be fixed before we release it. In particular, we’re interested in the feature’s:

• ease of use and discoverability
• completeness
• quality of implementation
• suitability to the problem it is solving
• conformity to Launchpad’s principles and UI guidelines.

We’re also aiming to timebox the testing; something that takes too long to explore is likely too complex. For now, we’re using a 25 minute limit, as borrowed from The Pomodoro Technique, as it seems like a good starting point.

If you’re interested in what we’re doing, you can follow our progress both on the launchpad-dev mailing list and on the Launchpad dev wiki. Also, I’m hoping that we can get your help in testing beta features. I’ll write more about that soon.

Launchpad has been operating in the squad structure for two months now. From my point of view, things have been going very well.

We are making steady progress on fixing timeouts, OOPSes, regressions and other operational issues.

The blue squad switched to maintenance after completing the ‘daily build’ project. The orange squad should follow-up soon once they complete the ‘sharing translations upstreams translations in Ubuntu’ project.

The cross-domain pollination is paying off. Having the API expert working as part of the squad finishing off the ‘daily builds’ work resulted in a long-due overhaul of our AJAX infrastructure. See the drive-by ajaxification of the blueprint page for the results! We saw similar things happen on the orange squad where the knowledge around the job system was put to good use.

I’ve got a lot of good feedback from developers who enjoy the enhanced focus they get in this new configuration.

As expected, the pace is picking up as the new squads learn to operate better together. The average of bugs closed per week went from 63 to 84.

At the last Thunderdome  (whole Launchpad team in person-meeting) where we kicked off the reorg, I issued a challenge: by the next Thunderdome (scheduled for the last week of June) we should:

• have no timeouts with a cut-off at 9s;
• have an empty critical bugs queue;
• be on our way to delivering new features within 45 days on average

The next Thunderdome is now 3 months away. How are we doing?

Yesterday, Robert announced that the timeout was lowered to 11s. That means we have 2 seconds left to go! Looks like this is going well.

On the second point, we have today 224 open critical bugs on the Launchpad project. We started at 264. So on the surface, it’s not going well. The trick here is that there were a lot of issues that weren’t on the list. So we kept finding new issues as we fixed some, giving an impression of stasis. Over the last two weeks though, we have seen a constant drop in the queue length, so I hope that all issues are now recorded and that we are on are way to burning this queue down. The fact that we are now closing 34 of those per week on average (over 21 per week when we started) gives me comfort. We need to make that number go down by 16 each week to reach our goal. So it seems well within reach!

The last one is more challenging. We have a big structural constraint that would make it hard to achieve a cycle time of 45 days on new features: our DB deployment story. Most feature will require two DB patch iterations and we deploy those every 30 days.  Nonetheless, we could read this goal as getting slots free on our ‘Next’ queue. That means finishing off everything that we have in progress plus some things that we haven’t started yet. We have some big items on there. Things like derived distributions and getting our bug privacy manageable. That’s where our real challenge lie! I’m looking forward to see how this will go.

Ever wanted to know what exactly is happening in Launchpad development, but found our list of in-progress bugs too daunting and detailed? Well, do we have a link and a screenshot for you.

Screenshot:

Link. (Log in: guest@launchpad.net; Password: launchpad).

Thanks to the nice folk at LeanKit Kanban, we’ve now got a guest account set up so that anyone can our kanban board. The board shows all of the high level features that we are working on (those are the green ones), the infrastructure projects we’re doing (those are the blue ones) and all of the community-driven work that we know about (the yellow ones).

The further to the right a card is, the closer it is to being done. The cards in the Next column are the things we’ll start to work on once we’ve got room on the board to start them. “UA” means we’re fixing the final few bugs in a feature before we consider it to be done, and “Deployment” means that we need sysadmins to do something.

Our goal is to keep the amount of work-in-progress down to a small number, and to be able to move things from left to right as quickly as possible. We hope making the board available gives you a better insight into Launchpad development, and maybe even encourages you to join in the fun.

Update: We’ve fixed the log-in credentials, for real this time. Sorry for publishing the wrong ones previously, and previously before that.

We are updating the UI over several iterations over the next few weeks for several reasons:

• Launchpad should apply the Canonical guidelines for websites to take advantage of the research done for other sites. Being consistent with other Ubuntu and Canonical sites means there is less for users to learn about what the presentation means.
• Launchpad has 730 style rules. Most are dedicated to defining exceptions, not standards. 730 rules is too much, too much for developers to maintain, too much for users to understand.

Many users have remarked about Launchpad’s recent the loss of colour.  We did this because:

• It is hard to learn the meaning of so many colours.
• It is confusing to see headings of different colour that have the same meaning.
• Answers and Blueprints used blue, the same colour as links.
• There were inappropriate uses of green that confused users who know that green means “perform an action without leaving the page”.
• The were uses of orange and purple that users might mistake for Canonical’s aubergine and Ubuntu’s orange.

We appreciate your feedback, and we would like to hear more. There are also legitimate concerns being raised and we are not surprised because they are the same concerns we discussed.

1. Headers are harder to identify

Indeed they are. The old colours were hiding the font-size and whitespace issues that are still present in Launchpad. I am working on this issue right now. Launchpad uses many font sizes, and the percentage mechanism used does not render the size developers intend (font size smaller than default creates accessibility and usability difficulties). I think headers will be easier to understand when there are fewer, but distinct, font-sizes being used.

2. Buttons, callout actions, are hard to find

The links to report a bug for example look like normal links. They are hard to see. These important actions are no longer callouts. The only action that users can still find is the green download button…but that green does not mean “perform an action without leaving the page”. This is bad. We do know what to do about this yet. Maybe you can help. I think they need colour, they may need iconography. Look at http://www.ubuntu.com/ to see an example button and callout links. Launchpad does not have a colour at this moment. Launchpad does not have an obvious position along the axis described in the website guidelines (Canonical, corporate, aubergine)..(Ubuntu, community, orange). Launchpad definitely has both aspects; Canonical created Launchpad to build Ubuntu. I think there is a second axis for upstream projects (corporate and community, hosted and mirrored, Ubuntu and other OSes) that might need a colour. Most of the links that I think of are about participation in community, so I favour orange. But is this right? Does the orange also mean Ubuntu to non-Ubuntu users? Will the use of orange stop users from reporting a bug in the OpenStack project?

As part of improving performance we have disabled the substring matching of source package names. This fixes bug 268508 and bug 607960. However its a slightly contentious issue – opinions vary about whether bug 268508 is a valid bug or not.

So we have only disabled it – the code is still present and when we have more leeway on the performance of bug searching we’ll revisit this and look into some design and UI analysis to decide whether substring matching of this sort should be done or not.

For now though, there should be less timeouts in bug searches.

Launchpad’s bug mail can be a bit chatty sometimes as I’m sure you’ve noticed.  This cycle the Yellow Squad is working to give you more control about the bug mail Launchpad sends to you.

One problem that we’ve known about for a really long time was reported as bug 548 and has recently been closed thanks to the effort of  Данило Шеган and Gary Poster.  Their fix allows you to globally specify whether you want to receive email about actions you did.

Most people probably do not need to be reminded of something they did a few minutes ago and will want to turn off those emails.  But, since this is new functionality we’ve preserved the old behavior unless a user changes the setting.  If you do nothing you’ll continue to get email about actions you instigate on bugs.

Opting out of those messages is easy.  Simply go to https://launchpad.net/people/+me/+edit and uncheck the box as shown below by the big red arrow.

As mentioned, this is just the first of many features and refinements that we’re working on to help you customize the stream of bug mail coming from Launchpad to suit your needs.

In twelve hours from this posting, Launchpad’s web interface will be read-only, with other aspects offline, for around 90 minutes. This is to allow us to make an update to the structure of the Launchpad database. This replaces the previous read-only period announced for Feb 10th 2011 23.00 UTC.

Starts: 09.00 UTC 11th of February 2011
Expected back by: 10.30 UTC 11th of February 2011

There is a slim possibility that the Launchpad’s web interface will be completely unavailable. Because of circumstances beyond our control, the recovery procedure from the aborted roll-out wasn’t able to be completed within the time frame necessary for the previously scheduled window. In the case where it wouldn’t be complete for that next window, we will still complete the roll-out by taking the web interface offline.

I’m sorry that we’ve had to delay this period of service disruption on such short notice.