One of the largest challenges we've continually faced at Puppet labs is trying to find a good balance in splitting the development team's time between the (currently small amount of) commercial software, and the (much larger amount of) open source software. This balancing act has, unfortunately, affected being able to get a number of the excellent contributions from people outside of Puppet Labs the attention that they deserve, and also affected being able to give the internal "commercial" development the attention it deserves to further Puppet Labs as a business.
As a step towards simplifying the decision towards how to divide our time, we're dividing our responsibilities instead. We're splitting the team to form one dedicated to owning the open source projects, focused on their quality, frequency of delivery, and ease of contribution. This team's long-term goal is to build "outside" contribution, and generally ensure that we have a healthy and active open source community. One of the short-term effects of this is that it will be much clearer who will be responsible to the community for making sure that you get the interactions you're looking for, and that the things you care about are making their way into the various open source projects. Right now this Open Source team consists of Josh Cooper, Nick Lewis, and myself. As the "Open Source" team, we're planning on sending periodic updates to the puppet-dev mailing list (and possibly user) with the results of our planning meeting (what we roughly plan on working on over the coming iteration), and with information similar to Git's "What's Cooking" updates[1] (what's in the repository pending release). We haven't figured out with what frequency to send these updates (other than the results of the iteration planning meeting). If you have any thoughts on how frequently you think this information would be useful, we'd love the input. We're also toying around with some ideas on how to get better visibility into the daily stand-ups we have. We haven't had time to think about this one too much, but so far we've got three rough proposals. * Have each person do their stand-up check-in on the puppet-dev mailing list. * Have someone send a stand-up summary to the mailing list after each stand-up. * Do something akin to the Pivotal Labs stand-up summary blog posts[2]. Again, if you have any ideas, we'd love to hear them. This isn't exactly a change (we've just been forgetting to mention it), but you can see what the current "community patch backlog" looks like by going to our Patchwork instance[3]. We've been using Patchwork for a while to keep track of the patches that go through the dev mailing list, to try and prevent them from slipping through the cracks. One of our goals is to get this backlog down to zero, and keep it as close to that as possible. Another long-term change that has been mentioned in passing, but hasn't really been fleshed out is moving the other teams to be "just normal contributors". Having them go through the same contribution process as everyone outside of Puppet Labs (though with the ability to walk over or holler, instead of having to email if they need something). We'll likely be making more changes in the future to further achieve the goal of having a strong/vibrant/healthy open source community, though we haven't figured any of this out yet. If you have any ideas for things you'd like to see, or comments/suggestions/questions about anything I've mentioned please feel free to bring them up here, or contact me personally. [1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/171013 [2] http://pivotallabs.com/blabs/categories/standup [3] https://patchwork.puppetlabs.com/ -- Jacob Helwig
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