What are the most interesting things about OpenStack? One group looks to its community to discover OpenStack’s points of interest, and concern. Every week the members of the OpenStack Product Working Group (Product WG) share collected feedback to create a multi-release roadmap of what is most interesting and important to users.

“It’s about collaboration, understanding that we all have different needs, but OpenStack is there for all of us,” said Shamail Tahir, offering manager of OpenStack Initiatives at IBM. The principle is that if you want something tomorrow, chip in and help those who want it today, and then it will be there for you when you need it.

Product WG members Tahir and Carol Barrett, data center software planner at the Open Source Technology Center at Intel, sia down with Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and John Walls, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas.

‘User stories’ guide development

Barrett described the group’s goal as identifying the most impactful requirements for further adoption and deployment of OpenStack clouds. These “user stories” allow the project teams to focus on developing what is most important to the key users. It is a multi-pronged attack to “get the right info to the right folks with right level of detail, at the right time,” she said.

With the enormous growth of OpenStack, from 75 attendees at the first conference in Austin 10 years ago to 7,500 contributors today, collaboration on the cross-project level is a challenge. Within the Prodect WG, cross-project liaisons help bring current user stories into the various project teams and bring out nuances about what is going to matter most about the user story to that team.

Project status and identification

Approximately 50 percent of attendees at each OpenStack summit are new users, said Tahir, and they need support to understand what projects are new versus established and stable versus experimental. The Product WG’s Project Navigator tool simplifies the project landscape, guiding users to identify projects based on maturity level and version.

Barrett is excited about the conversation level rising in the stack, with the question of “what is the value to business?” an indicator of the growing broad base adoption of OpenStack and its stickiness in the market.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit — Austin OpenStack Summit — Austin. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photo by SiliconANGLE