Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Anyone have time in the next week?

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Posted by Bruce Spear on
Hi Tracy, Thanks for the invite.  I'm going to go ahead and volunteer myself, and maybe others on the UAB, to offer to give my/our two cents of opinion at the moment a developer is sitting down with a portlet and developing a line of attack for addressing it and its bugs.  I'd think the mechanism is for a developer to ask one or more of us right when they are ready to hear of it and so serve as a sounding board.  Speaking for myself, I offer that two cents with quick turnaround time.  All the best,  Bruce
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Posted by Tracy Adams on
Hi Bruce,

Thanks for the offer to help.

I'd like to share, if I may, a little bit about how we try to organize development as well as why we do it that way.

First, it is important to realize that this whole process is VERY complicated.  There are probably hundreds of thousands of lines of code in OpenACS/.LRN.  There are hundreds of people involved in different ways. As you can imagine, this poses some management challenges.

Lot's happens by individual develpers and people in different places doing various projets.  This is a big, important part of the vibrancy and progress in the community.  We don't make efforts to try to control that because we would only slow that down and make complications.

The .LRN 2.1 (and any big release) is a little bit different.  The big goal of that is to really get something of quality.  So that means we need to get a good picture of everything that needs done as a whole and make sure we keep track of it so that we know where we are and how much there is to do at all times.  The goal is to narrow in a make a big improvement for the product as a whole.

To give you an example, I just spent about 2 days going through every single bug in the bug tracker in order to get an understanding of the scope of what we need to do, understand how we might be able to categorize and organize our work, and to create a first pass of "this is what will be in the release".

Dee, the testing leader, is also going through a similar process.

Then what happens?
a) we will take another pass at prioritizing what is importnat
b) I'll continue to recruit people to work on specific areas
c) We'll keep a running list of the issues and bugs
d) We'll set up a central test server and keep updating it so people can verify what get's fixed
e) When we've met certain criteria, we'll cut alpha and beta release so people can install and try them out

The big picture view is that in order to organize hundreds of bugs and dozens of people, I need to look at it from an overall process point of view and design something that will work efficiently.

This is pretty standard development methodology. Hopefully, I've explained some of the reasons why.

What the .LRN release really needs at this point is people interested in participating in the overall methodology to bring out a quality release.

Since this is response to Bruce and I want to be respectful on his offer to help, let me comment on that.  Your offer to help and work with developers one-on-one is greatly appreciated.  And already, you are a great contributor to the community.  And there is certainly lots of opportunity for that I'm hoping all that will continue..

What I'm hoping and also offering is an opportunity to work on the release in a role that follows a development and release methodolgy that fits the type of project we are doing and hopefully I've justified why I am managing it this way.  If it fits into something you'd like to do, I'd love you on the team.