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Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines

orchestra.unlimitedlabs.com

11–20 of 21 posts

Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines

#12
Does this tie into products like PivotalTracker or JIRA to make it useful for agile software development?

It would be nice to be able to create tasks from stories in Pivotal, assign a reviewer to them, and, when a reviewer thumbs-up, have it automatically built into a staging server. Anything like that in the works?

Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines

#13
post #10

This might seem a dumb question, but can you talk about how this improves on existing productivity workflows? Does it integrate with tasking systems like Jira or is this meant to be a complete a replacement? It seems high-level (and great) I'm just curious what implementing it "in the field" would look like.

Products like Jira help organize tasks within workflows, but don't automate any that organization. Orchestra takes care of things like "which reporter should I assign to a new story?" without requiring humans to make those decisions.

Research from the Flash teams project that I mentioned in another comment (http://stanfordhci.github.io/flash-teams/index.html) has shown that this type of automation can decrease end-to-end workflow time by as much as 2x!

Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines

#14
post #12

Does this tie into products like PivotalTracker or JIRA to make it useful for agile software development? It would be nice to be able to create tasks from stories in Pivotal, assign a reviewer to them, and, when a reviewer thumbs-up, have it automatically built into a staging server. Anything like that in the works?

We haven't built that integration yet, but it's totally possible! Really all it should take is a Machine Step that calls out from Python to, say, Pivotal's APIs (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pivotaltracker).

Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines

#18
This looks absolutely wonderful. A few random thoughts:

1. I'm going to play with this as a way of documenting processes. Being able to answer "how do you develop features" or "what's best practice for X" with a usable process is great.

1 a) I'm particularly interested in using this for documenting how to perform experiments, and tracking experiments as they go.

2. I think this is amazing for progressively automating things. Split the task up into manageable, clear chunks to be performed by people. Each step can then (if it seems worth it) be replaced by code.

3. I don't think this is present at the moment (and it probably shouldn't be for a first release) but I'd like to see process hierarchies and importing others. I'd like to say 'Use github's "GITFLOW V2" process for managing feature additions and use "MY_COMPANY_QA V3" for reviewing features before full release'.

Anyway, this is great, and I look forward to playing around with it.

edit -

Even without these, I can already see myself using it just for me.

edit 2 - It'd be good to work on the getting started, so that there's just a "run this script" or "clone this repo". There's a lot of "download this file and copy it here" that feels like it should be scripted.

Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines

#19
post #18

This looks absolutely wonderful. A few random thoughts: 1. I'm going to play with this as a way of documenting processes. Being able to answer "how do you develop features" or "what's best practice for X" with a usable process is great. 1 a) I'm particularly interested in using this for documenting how to perform experiments, and tracking experiments as they go. 2. I think this is amazing for progressively automating…

Thanks for the feedback!

Your comment about embedding external QA workflows is super interesting. Right now Orchestra does support what we call 'Review Policies', which allow you to specify that a given workflow step be reviewed k times, or with probability X, or by specific expert Z. But it would be interesting to think of whole workflows for QA.

Re: getting started, yeah, we're working on a script--turns out cross-platform support is hard!

Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines

#20
post #19
post #18

This looks absolutely wonderful. A few random thoughts: 1. I'm going to play with this as a way of documenting processes. Being able to answer "how do you develop features" or "what's best practice for X" with a usable process is great. 1 a) I'm particularly interested in using this for documenting how to perform experiments, and tracking experiments as they go. 2. I think this is amazing for progressively automating…

Thanks for the feedback! Your comment about embedding external QA workflows is super interesting. Right now Orchestra does support what we call 'Review Policies', which allow you to specify that a given workflow step be reviewed k times, or with probability X, or by specific expert Z. But it would be interesting to think of whole workflows for QA. Re: getting started, yeah, we're working on a script--turns out cross-…

> Right now Orchestra does support what we call 'Review Policies', which allow you to specify that a given workflow step be reviewed k times, or with probability X, or by specific expert Z.

That's handy, I can think of a bunch of things that fit well with that (particularly review a subset of x%)

> Re: getting started, yeah, we're working on a script--turns out cross-platform support is hard!

Hah, yeah it is!

I've got a version setup now, but am struggling a bit to setup workflows & figure out quite what goes where, but I think I've found the right bit of documentation: http://orchestra.readthedocs.org/en/latest/example_use.html

As a suggestion, if you add a new example, try doing it step by step of what you need to add & do. It's more work, but I find it really helps show what someone will actually experience while creating / updating workflows.

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