[Haskell-cafe] Proposal: Professionalizing GHC Development

[Gershom B]

Fellow Haskellers,

Recently there has been much work into creating a better and more
professional GHC development process, including in the form of DevOps
infrastructure, scheduled releases and governance, etc. But much
remains to be done. There continues to be concern about the lack of
use of industry-standard tools. For example, GHC development is tied
to Phabricator, which is a custom product originally developed for
in-house use by an obscure startup. GHC development is documented on a
wiki still -- ancient technology, not appropriate for 2018. Wiki
syntax for documentation needs to be replaced by the only modern
standard -- github flavored markdown. Trac itself is ancient
technology, dating to 2003, well before anybody knew how to program
real software. It provides no support for all the most important
aspects of software development -- Kanban boards, sprint management,
or even burndown charts.

What is necessary is an integrated solution that holistically
addresses all aspects of development, fostering a DevOps culture,
embracing cloud-first, agile-first, test-first, disrupt-first
principles, and with an
ironclad SLA. Rather than homegrown solutions, we need a GHC
development process that utilizes tools and procedures already
familiar to regular developers. Cross-sectional feature comparison
analysis yields a clear front-runner -- Visual Studio Team Services.

VSTS is a recognized Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for
Enterprise Agile Planning tools. It lets us migrate from custom git
hosting to a more reliable source control system -- Team Foundation
Version Control. By enforcing the locking of checked-out files, we can
prevent the sorts of overlap between different patches that occur in
the current distributed version management system, and coordinate
tightly between developers, enabling and fostering T-shaped skills.
Team Build also lets us migrate from antiquated makefiles to modern,
industry-standard technology -- XML descriptions of build processes
that integrate automatically with tracking of PBIs (product backlog
items), and one-button release management.

In terms of documentation, rather than deal with the subtleties of
different markdown implementations and the confusing world of
restructured text, we can utilize the full power of Word, including
SharePoint integration as well as Office 365 capabilities, and integration
with Microsoft Teams, the chat-based workspace for collaboration. This
enables much more effective cross-team collaboration with product and
marketing divisions.

One of the most exciting features of VSTS is powerful extensibility,
with APIs offered in both major programming paradigms in use today --
JVM and .NET. The core organizational principle for full application
lifecycle management is a single data construct -- the "work item"
which documentation informs us "represents a thing," which can be
anything that "a user can imagine." The power of work items comes
through their extensible XML representation. Work items are combined
into a Process Template, with such powerful Process Templates
available as Agile, Scrum, and CMMI. VSTS will also allow us to
analyze GHC Developer team performance with an integrated reporting
data warehouse that uses a cube.

Pricing for up to 100 users is $750 a month. Individual developers can
also purchase subscriptions to Visual Studio Professional for $45 a
month. I suggest we start directing resources towards a transition. I
imagine all work to accomplish this could be done within a year, and
by next April 1, the GHC development process will be almost
unrecognizable from that today.

Regards,
Gershom