[WG: Sakai QA] Maintenance Team Discussion

Adam Hocek Adam.Hocek at marist.edu
Thu Jul 16 11:26:10 PDT 2009


I would like to participate in this group and can dedicate time.  At 
Marist College we have been supporting the QA instances of WAS and DB2.

Adam Hocek
Information Technology
Marist College
tel: 845-575-3948



From:
Clay Fenlason <clay.fenlason at et.gatech.edu>
To:
management at collab.sakaiproject.org, Sakai QA 
<sakai-qa at collab.sakaiproject.org>, "sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org 
Developers" <sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Date:
07/16/2009 11:03 AM
Subject:
[WG: Sakai QA] Maintenance Team Discussion



Among the topics treated in Saturday's project coordination
discussions (as well as the product council meeting and a breakfast of
forlorn managers) was the idea of a "maintenance team."  I'm going to
try to represent this broad discussion for community comment,
following which I'll try to draft a consensus proposal that may be
used to attract concrete commitments.

The goals of such a team seemed fairly uncontroversial. Support for
the idea in principle was echoed by managers at IU, Cambridge, CSU,
Berkeley, Georgia Tech, UCT, UMich, and Unicon, and was reinforced by
a post-mortem examination of the 2.6 QA process. The goals expressed
were:

- to have a reliable set of resource to call upon in fixing problems in 
the code
- to allow institutions to reclaim development resource at the end of
a project without threatening maintainability of the codebase.
Tracking down the original developer to fix issues has not proved to
be a sustainable tactic.
- to provide expert review of code quality and to that extent
influence the question of whether a given project is ready for release
(ie 'maintainability' may be measured by whether the maintenance team
is prepared to take it on)
- to provide a way for new contributors to learn and become active in
the developer community; submitting patches for bugs is a time-honored
way to both get many eyes on the problem and get people on the
meritocratic on-ramp.

But that leaves open many practical questions.  The project
coordination discussion on Saturday took things further by examining
two models for such a team:

1) a single, strong coordinator with a diffuse set of devoted time (ie
managers of developers would commit hours of time from their teams
rather than particular people)
2) a small set of core, dedicated people (ie managers of developers
would commit larger shares of time from particular people)

In the end (of the discussion on Saturday) it seemed that the only
model which could satisfy the goals would be a hybrid.  Without a set
of core people it was felt that mentorship would be hard to achieve,
for example, and yet without a diffuse membership with a low threshold
for entry it would be more difficult for managers to make the resource
commitment, and more difficult for new participants to get engaged.
So we came to the point of proposing:

3) a small set of core, dedicated people providing leadership and
mentoring for a diffuse pool of effort based on a commitment of hours
from managers of development resource.

A few other practical points were agreed on:

- a Foundation staff member would need to initiate the effort to first
assemble such a team (and it should be Michael's problem to figure out
who)
- once the initial team was assembled, it should self-organize in
taking on its charge
- lest there be any confusion, the team would be devoted to fixes, not
new features

If I've left anything out, I'm sure someone will correct me. Other
comments and questions are welcome.

-- 
Clay
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