[Sugar-devel] Announcing the Development Team Lead election

[Simon Schampijer]

On 05/15/2010 06:48 PM, Chris Ball wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Tomeu's stepping down as the Development Team Lead¹, and we'd like to
> elect a replacement.  This is an important position -- the team lead
> is responsible for setting clear goals for the team, being a
> responsive upstream for work we receive from the community, appointing
> a release manager for the next (0.90) release and helping to define
> its scope, and holding regular Development Team meetings on IRC,
> including coordination with the Design and Deployment Teams on new
> features.  There are more details on the role and the team here:
>
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team

Hi Chris,

the position as you describe it, seems quite complex. I would make a 
difference between a coordinator and a leader. The coordinator will make 
sure there are regular meetings to be held and to give a structure for 
those and is in contact with the release manager about the schedule. A 
team can have several leaders, this role is not appointed but comes 
naturally with the work one has been doing, in my opinion.

I don't think the development team lead has to appoint the release 
manager. From my experience I can say, that I did one release with Marco 
together and then kept on doing it. Ideally a model where the current 
release manager is shadowed and then keeps on that task. If we have more 
candidates that want to fulfill that role, even better, they can share 
this task.

Coordination with the design team is a good point, and the design team 
coordinator is another critical open vacancy. Last release I did manage 
that since I was interested in the outcome for the release, though this 
was not a long term solution ;)

And for the general strategy, we have the Feature process [1]. This 
helps all the deployments and contributors to raise their voice. And if 
there is consensus in the community the Features will make their way 
forward into releases. So, we have the processes to move forward, we 
just have to use them and keep on doing.

In general, I think we should wide spread more the load. There is an 
issue of resources. And we have to describe the positions and fill them. 
Make the roles small and clear, define them well and communicate well 
between the teams are the keys here.

Most of the tasks are not that time consuming at all, but if people does 
fill out several roles it quickly gets too much for the individual.

 From my experience from last releases I would definitely add to the 
list: the deployment team position (which has been done already), the 
design team one and the testing one. Those were always the week points 
in previous releases.

Thanks for helping to enhance in this area,
    Simon

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Policy