Subject: possibly entertaining statistics

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:13:34 +0300

RFC publication speed (time from draft-smith-00 to RFC, measured in millibits/s):
http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecycle/sizematters.html

Raw data if you want to look at a specific draft:
http://www.arkko.com/tools/draft-timing-withspeeds.txt

Development of RFC production speed over the years, divided between rfced/iesg/wg:
http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecycle/wgdocs.html

Some other data:
http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecyclestats.html
http://www.arkko.com/tools/admeasurements/stat/base.html

(Disclaimer: all data subject to correctness of tracker information such as "replaced-by" data, the data has been processed by countless bugs in my script, opening these links in your browser voids your warranty, staring at statistics and ignoring quality may lead to a management promotion, etc.)

Jari

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From: "Thomson, Martin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2011 06:42:17 +0800

> http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecycle/sizematters.html

This isn't particularly empirical, but it would seem that of the faster drafts, having the three characters 'bis' in the title helps.

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From: Warren Kumari <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2011 18:44:54 -0400

> This isn't particularly empirical, but it would seem that of the faster drafts, having the three characters 'bis' in the title helps.

Ah! As a firm believer in cargo cult practices I am now going to include the string -bis- somewhere in the title of all new drafts… 

:-P
W

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From: "Thomson, Martin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2011 06:49:41 +0800

On 2011-09-08 at 08:44:54, Warren Kumari wrote:
> > This isn't particularly empirical, but it would seem that of the
> faster drafts, having the three characters 'bis' in the title helps.
> 
> Ah! As a firm believer in cargo cult practices I am now going to 
> include the string -bis- somewhere in the title of all new drafts...

The following working group names are still open: bistro, ibis, ...

Sadly, this hasn't worked for httpbis and urnbis doesn't look good.

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From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2011 20:29:13 -0400

> Sadly, this hasn't worked for httpbis and urnbis doesn't look good.

On a serious note, the unusualness of the *bis drafts implies that new work
should be looked at separately from revisions of old work.

On a less serious note, it would be difficult to categorize anubis. :-p

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2011 20:56:07 -0400

--On Wednesday, September 07, 2011 20:29 -0400 Scott Brim
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Sep 7, 2011 6:50 PM, "Thomson, Martin"
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> 
>...
> On a serious note, the unusualness of the *bis drafts implies
> that new work should be looked at separately from revisions of
> old work.

At least in a couple of the recent cases, it also implies very
focused updates to relatively mature documents with answers like
"millions of people are and think so" to questions like "who is
using this and does it work".  Even then, probably not as smooth
as it should be.

I would not expect similar treatment for, e.g., a 5321bis, which
is one of the reasons it hasn't been seen lately.

> On a less serious note, it would be difficult to categorize

:-)

    john

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From: Hector <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Sep 2011 01:37:11 -0400

>> http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecycle/sizematters.html

Jari, throwing bait to systems modeling engineers is not right! :)

> 
> This isn't particularly empirical, but it would seem that of 
> the faster drafts, having the three characters 'bis' in the title helps.

Curious about that, I imported the data into a SQL table and see 63% 
of the total 329 bis docs reaching RFC status.

Here are the totals of BIS docs that have a RFCDATE = 0000-00-00 
(field #16) vs the current state (field #22) which I took to mean it 
never got an RFC status:

+----------- RFCDATE = 0000-00-00 ------------+
| TOTAL| STATUS                               |
|------+--------------------------------------+
| 1    | AD is watching - External Party      |
| 1    | Publication Requested                |
| 1    | DNP-waiting for AD note              |
| 2    | AD is watching - AD Followup         |
| 2    | Waiting for AD Go-Ahead              |
| 3    | IESG Evaluation                      |
| 3    | IESG Evaluation - Revised ID Needed  |
| 3    | IESG Evaluation - AD Followup        |
| 6    | AD is watching                       |
| 7    | RFC Published                        |
| 10   | RFC Ed Queue                         |
| 28   | Dead                                 |
| 54   | ID Exists                            |
+---------------------------------------------+

That 7 count for "RFC Published" seems off, of course, probably 
reflects docs that did not get rfc date recorded in the tracker.

Overall, I think this is pretty good - we are careful! :)

I was curious to see how the # of revs correlated to the days from 
initial I-D to RFC publication date.

Total     :  8391
RFC Status:  5525 or 66%

While there were scattered data points # of revs vs the days to RFC 
publications, the pattern was faster RFC publications correlated to 
less revs were necessary.

Of course, this is only significant to show the more revisions an I-D 
has reflected an vetting and contention process (thats good) and the 
longer it took to progress to RFC status.

Then again, there were drafts that took years with 0 to 1 revisions.

For example 583 of the drafts had 0 revisions and ranged from 44 days 
to less than 10 years to get an RFC status and 714 drafts with 1 
revision had a range of 98 days to over 10 years to get an RFC status.

To me, its puzzling why many of these docs with [0,1] revs took so 
long as I would think that the less revisions one needs the closer it 
is to the "ideal protocol" it wanted, but then again, it may reflect 
the lack of WG vetting involved, so in the that vain, the system has 
worked.

Anyway, interesting data.

--
HLS