[OLPC-devel] OLPC development project organization. Status calls? Other techniques?

[Darryl Palmer]

On 5/31/06, Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org> wrote:
>
> 1) would a weekly/biweekly phone call help with coordination and
> communications?  If weekly, we might alternate times to favor far east
> vs. US and Europe on alternate weeks.


That would be great but we will need a moderator for it that isn't afraid to
cut people off and keep the meeting moving.  We should also try to record it
and have it up on a website for people to listen to it if they can't
attend.  We may need to designated a meeting secretary to write summary
notes.

2) would people prefer to post status to the list? in addition to a
> phone call?  instead of a phone call?


I think there should either be a website where the status of the projects
are at or 1 person should make 1 large mail with the status of all the
projects.  I would hate people to get hit by 20 or so emails on the status
of sub-projects each week.

3) we could put tasks needing doing into a tracking system (e.g.
> bugzilla) and track tasks that way?  Or are there better tools for this
> purpose we should install and use?


If I am working on a project, I want to know about my project in detail but
I don't care that much about other projects as long as they are on
schedule.  So I would want something like an "OLPC" wide feature list and
release schedule where someone can drill-down to get to the little things,
for example, whether the "Sugar" icons need to be modified to be
international friendly.

4) What should our preferred SCM be?


As long as what we pick helps me more then hinders me, I don't care.


> 5) Ivan is recommending we not use gforge having talked to some people
> who have been using it; this begs project hosting tools.  In my
> experience, account management quickly becomes a scaling issue.  It is
> important that project leaders be able to add members to projects
> immediately without requiring central approval or manual account
> creation. I know there are tools developed by a number of other
> projects: e.g. handhelds.org has time tested and recently improved
> tools. There may be others.  Time is of the essence if we want to go
> this route. If you know of such tools, please let me know so we can make
> a rational judgment of what to do in this area.


In most Open Source projects it is usually the Lead
Architect/Designer/Programmer that is the Project Leader, we may just have
to revert to having a specialized Project Leader for the larger
sub-projects.


One of the things that I want to make sure of is that everyone that is
working on the core project has confidence.

1) Confidence in knowing what they are doing is correct.
We have a specific list of features/requirements/tasks with priorities,
and/or a "customer" representative to ask questions to and get feedback on.

2) Confidence in knowing a defect will be found.
While I expect all the developers to have a personal process for software
quality, we should have a build system to make sure that everything still
compiles at least.  If we have some automated tests running also it would be
neater.

3) Confidence in knowing when you are done with a task.
It maybe that we have enough resources to continue development down to when
we freeze the code, but it would be nice to know when something is good
enough to ship.  If it is up to each developer to do this, or if we have
someone review the running program or app to do this, I don't know.



Darryl
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