[WG: Sakai QA] [Building Sakai] Maintenance Team Discussion

[Clay Fenlason]

I'd add that Anthony would be far better at this than I would be.

~Clay

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 1:04 PM, Anthony Whyte<arwhyte at umich.edu> wrote:
> I was nominated at Saturday's meeting to work on putting together a
> maintenance team.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Anth
>
>> - 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)
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 16, 2009, at 11:03 AM, Clay Fenlason wrote:
>
>> 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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>
>



-- 
Clay Fenlason
Director, Educational Technology
Georgia Institute of Technology
(404) 385-6644