Now that Sugar Labs has released .8.2 to OLPC it is time to revisit the release cycle issue.
I have the feeling that most of us agree _in_principle_ to the idea that an established release cycle is important. As part of his Ph.D. Martin Michlmayr has done some interesting research on the topic. He provides a good introduction to the topic in his talk 'Open Source Speaker Series: Release Management in Large Free Software Projects'. [1] His thesis is also available. [2] Some thoughts on on how the release process applies to Sugar Labs. - Background - 1. Software engineering is hard. There is no silver bullet. No design methodology, governance process, or optimistic belief is going to ensure the success of Sugar. 2. Sugar is Open Source. 3. Sugar Labs is a community. At the end of the day, it does not matter why Sugar Labs chose the community development process. It is here and we are stuck with it;) both good points and bad points. - Stakeholders - 4. Are our stakeholder happy? The primary goal of any software project is to ensure that its stakeholders are happy. This happy is not a '70 kind of happy. Rather, it is a happy where our users continue to chose our product over similar products and contributing stakeholders feel that they have a net benefit from the time, effort, and money the invest in the project. 5. Who are our stakeholders? Currently, we can roughly divide our stakeholders into three categories: OLPC, RedHat, and Sugar Labs. It would be convenient if we could split our group cleanly into these categories. We can't. Some Sugar Labs volunteers align themselves with the OLPC goal. Some RedHat employees are under contract through OLPC. Some OLPC employees are involved in spreading Sugar beyond the XO. 6. What are our stakeholder's long term goals? Make Sugar the best, most widely available, learning environment. 7. How do we meet those goals? At its heart, this is an economic problem. All of our stake holders have unlimited wants and limited resources. - Fast, cheap, now. Chose two. - 8. What are our Stakeholder's short term goals? Disclaimer: I have no formal knowledge of anyone's goals. These are the goal I would have if I was wearing the stakeholders shoes. 8a. OLPC. Stability and predictability. OLPC is providing support for an entire deployment stack. Hardware, Software, and content. As such, they need to have a _stable_ piece of software in the field. For the next release, they need predictability. They need to know how Sugar will fit into their stack 6 months, 1 year, and more into the future. 8b. Redhat. Grow the Linux market and mindshare. Redhat has been doing a pretty good business selling subscriptions to their distribution. Their subscription model is unique in that the software is available for free and their interoperability efforts reduce the cost of leaving RedHat to $0. They want to expand the world wide market for linux by making it the best technological product. They want to associate the Fedora/Redhat brands with these efforts. 8c1. Sugar Labs. Survival. In all seriousness, our immediate goal is survival. We are faced with the challenge of retaining our current stakeholder while adding enough new stakeholders to be come self-sustaining. 8c2. Sugar Labs. Engage stakeholders to improve Sugar. We want to improve Sugar to the point that: Sugar is the platform of choice for educators. Sugar is the platform of choice for educational application developers. Sugar is the platform of choice for educational distributions. Sugar is the platform of choice for hardware developers. - Rock, Scissors, Paper - 9. For the past several months it seems that we have been using the children's game of rock, paper scissors as our decision making mechanism;) Every decision needed a winner and a loser. Now, it is time for our stakeholder representative to sit down and hash out a plan for the up coming release cycle. I am not naive enough to think that we can immediately forget our past grudges or politics. But, I am optimistic enough to think that we can agree enough to set mutual goals and allocate resources to those goal...for one release cycle. The best thing about release cycles is that in six months we can revisit our goals and asset reallocation. 1. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5503858974016723264 2. http://www.cyrius.com/publications/michlmayr-phd.html thanks dfarning _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
