On Sunday, June 3, 2012 11:47:02 Harry Miller wrote: > > The number of developers who need to be hit by a bus for the > > project to be > > destroyed. 1 means there's a single point of failure (you), > > i.e., whenever you > > aren't available for whatever reason (such as the past few > > days), everything > > grinds to a halt. > > As if there isn't enough bickering and finger pointing already. There is > plenty of blame to go around. It would be great if people would start > accepting responsibility for their actions rather than trying to scapegoat > one person.
Henry, I believe you misunderstood what was being said. This has nothing to do with blame or responsibility, but rather ensuring that there are enough people with the knowledge and the mandate (e.g. feel like and do have the permission) to be able to do important core tasks like say "this is ready for release", roll releases if necessary, etc, etc. When there is just one person who manages a project and there are no other people who are able to step in and pick up the slack, then that project is said to have a "bus number of 1". It's just another way of stating that there is a procedural bottleneck caused by not having enough people ready and able to do the necessary work. It's not a good situation because any one of us may become unavailable for any number of reasons, and so having a back-up person is both sensible and responsible. It turns out that often people are not aware that there is no back-up person and they unintentionally become a bottleneck. Usually simply observing that there is a "bus number of 1" is all that's needed to improve the situation: usually people step up and increase the bus number and share the core responsiblities. In other words, it is precisely about accepting responsibility for one's roll within our projects, and has zero to do with scapegoating, blame, etc. (I think there's a hint of irony in your message as a result :) Anyways, I hope that helps to explain what was meant by my original statement. -- Aaron J. Seigo
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
_______________________________________________ release-team mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team
