Strategies for managing noise related to notifications

Owned by Kelly Foster
Jul 13, 2018
3 min read
Status
NOT STARTED
Stakeholderscore development team
Outcome
Due date
Owner
Kelly Foster 

Background

pyrofex.net inboxes have become noisy places. This noise makes it difficult for the team to identify what's important. As a result we are seeing members of the team ignoring notifications that are important. This creates risk to the project as we saw the week of July 9 when ignoring notifications of failed integration tests caused a delay in the release of RNode v0.5.

We will use this page to collect feedback from the team on the issue, their experiences, and recommendations for improvements.

Discussion

Please add your thoughts, experiences, and recommendations to this section. Select edit to add content.

Some content pulled from discussion in discord on July 13.

Your thoughts and experiences

You nameYour thoughts and experiences
Artur Gajowy
but for each and every failure, and each and every developer. Plus, there's GitHub notifications that are a duplicate of what I get from GitHub anyway. I also think most of us aren't interested in other's feature branches being broken.
Surely I can work around those using filters, but maybe we could have a better experience from the start for everyone?
Sebastian BachWe are getting notifications from Jira, Confluence, Github, Gitlab and Travis. Even with filters, this turns at some point into white noise
Jeremy Busk
The rchain-makers on fail is something @leaf wanted. @Medha, maybe you can readdress this. You can take that up with him. Just do a filter for now. Unfortunately I'm it and I'm wearing multiple hats as it is. If someone is willing to do this in the group, I'm more then willing to give them access/resources and help for them to acheive it. Hopefully I have some more help starting shortly. I think they have some more DevOps/SREs starting next month. It just is lower on the priority list. I can write a script to check generlized email content and then shoot to voicemail, sms, discord, or whatever else but I need 3 or 4 empty days to do that.
I like less noise, but like less code it takes a lot of work and tuning to get there.
I'll create a ticket to readdress this.

noise/signal is too high. I actually ignore my email for the most part. Maybe check it a few times in the day. I would recommend we allow users to opt in to all notifactions and email. I don't think notifactions are helpful to rchain-makers@pyrofex.net. All the devs just ignore them. I know because they don't respond to any of them. This was hard for me especially when I started working here. I just know what to ignore now, like Telegram, and certain channels but it was overwhelming when I got here. Artur might be like me and likes to understand everything and pays attention to all informatin. Just some thoughts.

As noted in ticket I'm actually with you to have less information/notifcations. It makes getting relevant information harder. Many devs will just end up ignoring. Maybe we need to make it a higher priority because it is discracting if you are trying to pay attention to email. I actually just check email periodically. Most devs do this and use Discord heavily. Maybe some of the other devs have some thoughts.

Recommendations for changes

Your nameChange recommendation+/- (feedback from others)
Artur GajowyI'd prefer a notification channel with higher signal/noise ratio



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