RFC: Adds Technical planning document

[sweir27]

Proposal

This RFC proposes:

• Adding a new document describing our technical planning process. This will be linked to from the existing technology_choices document, but since tech plans are about more than just adding new technologies, we feel it warrants its own page.
• Clarification to all steps of our current tech planning process, much of which is implicit. We expect these steps to change over time. This clarification touches topics such as:
  • What is a tech plan
  • When to write one
  • How to write one
  • What the possible states are (and how to advance between them)
  • How to choose stakeholders
  • How to provide feedback and approve a tech plan
• Consolidating a few fields on the template:
  • Contributors and Champions will be removed, replaced by a single field “Author(s)” so that it’s clear who to contact about a given tech plan. We expect this to be filled by 1-2 people.
  • Removing the DRI and Decider fields. We found these fields are used differently by different team members and add confusion. We instead propose an updated “Stakeholders” section which should cover this need.
• Adding a new state: Implemented, to clarify the difference between a tech plan that was accepted (but then deprioritized) vs. one whose changes exist in code.
• Expanding the Stakeholders section to include different review states: Approved, Rejected, and Changes Requested (with a comment field) in order to clarify the review process.

Reasoning

As our team has grown and more tech plans have been written, it’s become clear that some clarification of our existing process would help streamline the process. The lack of clarity was confirmed in a recent survey we conducted with the engineering team. While most respondents appreciated the open nature of our tech planning process and how widely it has been adopted, there were a lot of questions, particularly around the states and approval process.

The goal of this RFC is to make our tech planning process clearer. By writing down what our existing process is, it should also be easier to update via similar RFCs to this one.

How is this RFC resolved?

If there is a strong majority of 👍 compared to 👎 and at least 20 votes, this RFC will be resolved.

There are two parts to this RFC resolution:

• Merging in this PR (taking comments into account), which adds the new document and links to it from a few places in README.
• Updating the tech plan template based on the proposal above.

[sweir27]

Thanks to all for the comments! I've addressed as many as I could. There are still a few outstanding discussions – I encourage people to follow up with subsequent PRs (or with follow-up discussion in #dev)!

After merging in, I'll update the tech plan template.