Re: [Gendispatch] Speed of the standards process

[Colin Perkins <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

On 25 Jul 2023, at 17:04, Jay Daley wrote:
> In Adrian’s talk today he suggested that there was a negative 
> perception of the IETF due to the length of time it takes to get 
> standards out.  This is something we tested in the most recent IETF 
> Community Survey where the question was:
…

We also looked at this in an IMC paper a couple of years ago:
https://sodestream.github.io/publications/characterising-ietf-rfc-deployment.pdf

The figures below show changes in the time taken from the submission of 
the first draft of a document through to its publication as an RFC and 
the number of intermediate drafts each document goes through prior to 
publication. There's a clear trend: drafts are taking longer to publish. 
The average time to publication was 469 days (~15 months) in 2001, 
rising to 1170 days (~38 months) in 2020. The number of revisions each 
document went though more than doubled in the same time period. The time 
to publish and the number of drafts prior to publication are strongly 
correlated, suggesting that the time is spent making changes to the 
document.

![](cid:[e-mail] 
"day_counts_yearly.png")
![](cid:[e-mail] 
"draft_counts_yearly.png")

What's causing this? There's no clear increase in draft length over 
time, but there is a a significant increase in the number of citations 
and cross references between drafts over the years (see plot below): 
work submitted to the IETF recently is much more likely to refer to 
prior work.

Similarly, the proportion of drafts published each year that update or 
obsolete one or more previously published RFCs has increased over time. 
In 2020, more then 30% of documents published updated or made obsolete a 
previously published document in the RFC series. Recent drafts also 
include more RFC 2119 keywords than earlier drafts.

![](cid:[e-mail] 
"cite_counts_yearly.png")

Our conclusion was that this data suggests that the delays are coming 
from the increasing complexity of the network and the increasing need to 
take into account backwards compatibility with increasing numbers of 
prior RFCs. The working group process is taking longer because on the 
increased complexity of the work.

As I said in the chat during the meeting, RASPRG is working to collect 
such data and better understand the standards process. Anyone interested 
in this sort of analysis might want to participate. 
https://datatracker.ietf.org/rg/rasprg/about/

Colin