hennevogel

What are the Boosters up to?

Summary

Long time no see! The last update on lizards is now over 2 months old and a lot of stuff happened. The Boosters have finished two Milestones: The build service project overview and the integration of web-apps with a common theme. Both results are awesome and enable people to be more productive. The build service project overview helps project maintainers, like Coolo for openSUSE:Factory, to keep up to date on what happens in their project. The overview includes things like packages that are not building, packages with a diff to the devel project and packages with a pending request. You know what’s the best part of this? To make the build service project overview possible we have put a lot of general work into the OBS webclient. So much that the webclient changes will be a big part of the upcoming OBS 2.0 release. The other Milestone we finished is the integration of our web-apps with a common theme: bento. Once we deployed bento to our apps everybody can navigate the opensuse web with a nice, task oriented design and find information where one expects them.

Events

The LinuxTag 2010 programm is final and online. We have 6 talks accepted ranging from packaging to kernel hacking. Most of them on Saturday which is traditionally the strongest day.

• Ruby on Rails in der openSUSE.org Infrastruktur – Thomas Schmidt
• Kernel Mode Setting – a Change in Paradigms for the Graphics Driver Stack – Egbert Eich
• The road to GNOME 3.0 Vincent Untz /Johannes Schmid
• Distribution Image building with KIWI – Christopher Hofmann
• The live A-Z Guide to openSUSE Contribution – Henne Vogelsang/Vincent Untz
• The Free Software Hell And How To Escape It – Adrian Schröter/Henne Vogelsang

We also got accepted as project for a booth and are currently working on the booth setup and program. Stay tuned for more news to come around this topic. Other events that we boosted are the Tokamak4 plasma hacking sprint Will successfully organized in our office. Vincent went to a GNOME Usability and a GSettings Hackfest. He also covered Solutions Linux 2010. Pavol, Michal and Petr went to the Chemnitz Linux Days 2010, Installfest.cz and LinuxExpo. Klaas to openExpo in Switzerland and a KDE Finance sprint in Frankfurt. Oh and Google Summer of Code sadly didn’t work out this year, maybe next time. As you can see we were busy event bees!

Milestones

We are currently trying to reach 3 Milestones. The Squad that is trying to create Discoverable Centralised Developer Documentation is progressing nicely. They fixed a lot of issues with mediawiki and Bento for the new wiki instance, transfered and re-worked the general wiki documentation so that people can help with the general transition and they also moved content like the Build Service pages and started with the Packaging side of things. The general focus is still on groundwork. The squad wants to transfer all the developer documentation as an example on how a topic in the new wiki should look and feel like. The next steps will be finishing that off and then to help with the attraction of contributors to the general transition.

Another squad is working on improving openFATE, especially to make it really usable for the screening team. In the end they want to have a new role of screener in the feature workflow. The role can change the status and reassign features between products. The first sprints where spend on educating themselves about the architecture of FATE and the structure of the web-app. The squad then worked on the proxy which is by now already passing changes through to the keeper. The next steps include changes to the web-app and hermes for reporting. During the course of these sprints discussions about introducing more roles and new features happened so the Milestone probably will get more Goals in the future.

The third squad is currently in transition away from the Bento/Umbrella milestone. The development of the theme for the Build Service, the Download Portal and the Wiki are done. They are currently working on a wrap-up post that will show you all the cool stuff. The remaining tasks of deploying all the services, and helping to create themes for openFATE, the Forums and our WordPress instances are new Milestones. Which Milestone this squad does next is not decided yet.

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Kick Ass!

This is a plea to the openSUSE Community!

This is an appeal to you!

This is a incitement to kick ass!

You think that you are not entitled to decide something?
YOU ARE GO KICK ASS!

Don’t be humble. You’re the man!

Despite the fact that our distribution is around for some time we are a very young open source project. We don’t have much organization. No hierarchy, very little processes, no roles or functions, no directions and only general rules. You participate in a time where it’s really you that makes a difference. If you’re humble now and try not to stick your neck out, this project will fail. Don’t be humble, KICK ASS!

Don’t wait for anything “official”. There is no one official.

There is only you and the people next to you. There is no one steering the openSUSE project, there is only you pushing your topic. There is no mastermind behind all this, there is only you thinking about your thing. There is no management (no also not from Novell), there is only you running your things. If you do something it’s what openSUSE does. If you decide something it’s what openSUSE decides. Don’t wait, KICK ASS!

You’re worried about your idea being liked?
THEY LOVE IT GO KICK ASS!

Don’t let the nay-sayers stop you. Push for your goal.

We value others’ opinions. We value openness. We value critique. We do NOT value consensus. It’s nice if it happens, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside but consensus is not the prerequisite for action. Try to incorporate the feedback you get as good as you can. Be open minded and willing to try new things. But also keep your goal in mind. You started with an idea on how to do something, don’t let the feedback kill your idea. Remember, there are at least 20 people who just like your idea and don’t say anything. Don’t let the nay-sayers stop you, KICK ASS!

Don’t be afraid of contradiction. We are not a logical consistent universe.

We can have a team but no leader. We can have vim and emacs. We can be self-contradictory! openSUSE consists of so many projects, ideas, values and people that they can’t possibly be all on the same page. You don’t need to prove to yourself or anyone else that you are. There also can be two or more things of the same kind even if they do exactly the same thing. Don’t be afraid of contradiction or duplication, KICK ASS!

You are unsure about something?
TRY IT GO KICK ASS!

Don’t think everything through to the end. Be playful!

We are an open source project. You need to release early, release often. Everything! Not only code but your frustrations, ideas and plans also. That means that people will see your early errors. People will spot your inconsistencies. People will get on your nerves with their own ideas about your stuff. But it also means you don’t have be 100% correct, don’t have to be 100% ready and you don’t have to do 100% yourself. Put everything out there, KICK ASS!

Don’t doubt it for a second. If you fall you will be picked up.

More often then we like it the things we dream of, the ideas we come up with, the lines of code we produce STINK. And that’s okay, shit happens. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, nobody will think less of you. In this community people will scrape you off the ground and put you on your feet again. Failure is punished by a pat on the back and a smile. Don’t doubt that for a second, fail but KICK ASS!

Stop contemplating!
Stop holding back!
Stop worrying!
KICK ASS!

What are the boosters up to?

Summary

The last sprint was going from February 4th to February 16th. Even though it included all of us going to FOSDEM over the first weekend we were able to reach one milestone: Buildservice Project Overview Page (a.k.a. factory.o.o) hurray! The wiki milestone finally moved forward again and the umbrella milestone got a new push with limiting it’s scope to the Bentoo theme. All in all a pretty successful sprint.

Retrospectiva

We finished the evaluation of retrospectiva and deployed it to http://retro.opensuse.org. Retrospectiva is now our project management tool of choice. The best part is that everybody, yes that means you, can simply follow what we do with it. For this you need to understand a few things. Most importantly the Terminology we use.

Milestones are big things we want to achieve. Like

Rid the world of all Evil

Goals are simpler things than milestones. They are defined from the customers point of view. It can be for example something like

Destroy the One Ring so we can get rid of the Dark Lord

Stories are simple technical steps that need to be done to reach a goal. Stories can be done by people. In this example it would be something like:

Cast the ring into a Volcano (Frodo)

Pretend to have the One Ring to distract the Dark Lord (Aragon)

Be the backup for Frodo (Gollum)

Customers don’t really want to know all that, the important thing is that we reach the milestone (no more evil in the world).

Sprints are the time units in which goals are achieved through finishing all stories they consist of. If they are not achieved they are simply moved to the next sprint. Once all goals are finished the milestone is reached and a new milestone is sought after.

The interface of Retrospectiva is pretty straight forward. On the top navigation bar you can choose how detailed you want to look at what we do.

If you choose the milestone option you will always see the three milestones we currently work on. They provide you with a high level overview and are the main information you can gather from this tool. If you choose the goals option you can have a look at the goals in the current sprint, which you can choose at the right hand menu. In the stories view you do the same, choose a sprint at the right menu and you have very detailed overview about who currently works on what.

We hope that you will find this tool useful, we for sure do. Of course we will continue to update everybody what we’re up to in blogposts like this, our mailinglist and our IRC channel. You should see this as additional source of information.

Standup Meeting

Last but not least the report about our last standup meeting. In this every squad has to stand up and tell the others what they did do in the last sprint, what they are planing to do in the next sprint and what blocks them currently.

The Factory Status Page Squad

We did finish upstream version tracking and with it the whole milestone.
You can see the result at:
https://build.opensuse.org/project/status?project=$PROJECT
so for instance
https://build.opensuse.org/project/status?project=openSUSE:Factory

We plan to announce it properly on and tell people about it. AI: wstephenson

We are blocked by nothing.

Integrate all Infrastructure under one Umbrella Squad:

We did add a proof-of-concept API to connect.o.o and generally worked on it. Thought about group Membership request voting (eg. for opensuse members group). We also deployed a new VM to be able to deploy/incubate our project. It also serves as host for retrospectiva.

We plan to push the Bento theme to wiki.o.o in cooperation with Frank. Port software.o.o to bento theme. A couple of Bento problems also need to be solved. We need to find a solution for wiki specific links and the
left column. We also will start browser testing/debugging. And to be able to gather contributors for connect.o.o we plan to finish the deployment and announce it properly.

We are blocked by nothing at the moment.

Discoverable Centralised Developer Documentation Squad

We did help to prepare the new instance so we can actually transfer content into it. For this we are making sure that the current content on wiki.o.o, mainly templates, is functional and follows the various guidelines of the wiki team. This is proving to be more work than expected, but it’s going forward.

We plan to finish the overhaul of the content and work on some missing technical features of the wiki like change notification. After this is finished we plan to finally transfer developer documentation into it. This shall be the first really useful area in the new instance and serve as an example of all the new features and processes.

We are blocked by nothing at the moment.

As one squad is finished with its milestone we also talked about how to continue from there. The outcome was that we will go after the milestone “Improve the openFATE process” and shuffle people around. The resulting new squads are:

Wiki: Henne, Tom, Petr, Lubos
Umbrella: Coolo, Robert, Darix, Michal, Pavol
openFATE: Klaas, Vincent, Will, Egbert

Thats it for this week. Thanks for reading and remember to have a lot of fun!

Read at Lizards