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2006-10-11 - On release cycles and development speed / #2369

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Marc Ferguson asked me about the current development speed:


I'm concerned about it's total lifecycle. Do you plan on developing this application for a long time? netOffice was great too, but I haven't heard anything from its developers in almost a year.



Since my reply might be interessting to others as well, here it is:

Thanks for your comment on Streber. As you might have noticed, development on streber still centers around my person which is not a good thing for an open source project. As I am currently very busy with commercial projects and private matters, the development slows down very much. The same happened with NetOffice, which was the reason to start Streber in the first place. But although it is a spare time project, I very much want to continue it and certainly will. Since I am not good a keeping promises I will not dare to give any time schedules.

What is really needed right now is a more regular release cycle and a method to ensure quality of upcoming development. We now have five regular programmers in the team (me included). And all have somehow their own priorities. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes too rapid development is not good for long terms... Currently we are discussing the front end for an API and a good culture of discussion seems to be evolving.

What I really would like to have complete in the next weeks are:
  1. Distinguish Tasks from Documentation (wiki)
  2. Anonymous browsing (of wiki)
  3. Registering of new users of streber
  4. Updating streber-pm.org
I think this will strengthen the community and give us more feedback. But a lot of others features are already sorted into the milestones.

tom

6 Comments

binder

Oct 11, 2006
some more coordination needed...

We now have five regular programmers in the team (me included). And all have somehow their own priorities. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes too rapid development is not good for long terms...

from pixtur


I'm also afraid, that we lack a bit of coordination at present. Your quote is exactly the point, I'm thinking of for a few days...

Perhaps we need some more coordination, more precise formulation of goals in the milestones. Every developer should focus on getting milestones done! Perhaps we could set up regular milestones for regular stable releases? It should then be the first goal to achieve the stable releases and then achieve others?

pixtur

Oct 12, 2006
Reply to some more coordination needed...
Well. barlas might help with coordinating releases and milestones.

Some suggestions:
  1. We could have a regular user meeting once a week as a skype conference. There we could discuss the next upcomming tasks and milestones.
  2. Searching through tasks. I know this is a pain in the ass, but it has to be done. Maybe we could establish a "clean up" phase where all open tasks are reevaluated and closed or moved to milestones.
I am open for any other suggestions.

binder

Oct 12, 2006
Antwort auf Reply to some more coordination needed...
regular skype-meetings sound very good! *G*

and beeing more focused on tasks (even though clicking through) is also a very good idea. clean up phase would be a time, when we reached a milestone or could be discussed in the regular meeting...

madlyr

Oct 12, 2006
Reply to Reply to some more coordination needed...
I think ALL tasks of type idea and bug should be assigned to milestones.
Why?
If so many tasks are open and not sorted, then it is problem to focus on current targets, etc.
With tasks assigned to milestones, team could easier focus on short roadmap targets, not future one.
We could then release faster stable versions.
We should disscuss sometimes, what is important for particular milestone.

Just let we use all main features of streber and let it won't be such a big pain ;-).

tino

Oct 13, 2006
version 2
Reply to Reply to some more coordination needed...
Hello all,

regular meetings are fine - good idea.

Searching through tasks can be a very interesting thing - I always find tasks I have never seen before ;-) - okay all joking aside.

Searching through tasks could be done along the way from every developer.
We could write them down and discuss them in the regular meeting.

And what we need very urgently is the so called "clean up phase" - there are still tasks, which don't belong to a folder (as an umbrella term) like Person can't be edited "Item has been modified during your editing by Unknown (1 minutes ago)" or Fehler beim Aufrufen der Seite (Aufgabe).

From my point of view this is very essential cause I browse the folder and check out the tasks in the folder.

Every task should have a parent (folder).

pixtur

Oct 13, 2006
version 3
On meetings and restructuring...
Thanks for all the replies!

On sorting out tasks

I definately agree, that any task should be sorted into a folder and if it is a feature/task, it also requires a milestone! I already implemented the "without milestone" preset for this.

On meetings:

Organizing the roadmap is hard for one person, because it is mostly a matter of taste. We could try to find an appointment in skype (To make a start I would suggest Thuesay, 17th of Oktober 20:00 GMT, but I am pretty flexible). There we could discuss the roadmap for maybe two weeks, create a milestone and precisely define who does who. Then meet again two weeks later, and see how it worked.
I think it could also be fun. My skype handle is pixtur_lkcc. Maybe all

We should discuss the timing and who will be there at this page: regular skype meetings. Also all interessted team member should update their profiles and enter the skype handle at into the description.

 
 

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