launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Bjorn Tillenius <bjorn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 08:20:45AM +1100, Robert Collins wrote:
> Is it feasible?
> ---------------
> 
> Launchpad-project has 5800 bugs, and ~30 developers, or about 19 bugs
> per developer. bzr (core, not plugins) has 1800 bugs, and <10 developers
> developers, or about 18 bugs per developer. bzr hasn't split its bug
> database and the developers manage to get things done quite
> successfully :)

I actually don't think that number or bugs in total, or number of bugs
per developer is that important. It's like you say, 1800 bugs isn't
that different from 5800. Sure, 3 times more,  but we also have three
times the developers. What's important is the number of developers.
Coordinating the work for 30 developers so way way much harder than
coordinating the work for <10. It's not 3 times harder; it's more than
that. That's why we divide the LP team into sub teams, so that the
coordination work actually gets feasible to do.


> 
> Why Not?
> --------
> 
> Perhaps Launchpad isn't a good enough bug tracker to work with 5800 bugs
> in a single product? (perhaps - lets find out, experiments are
> [relatively] cheap). However, scale wise there isn't much difference
> between 1800 and 5800 - they are both much more than a single page :),
> and I can tell you that Launchpad works quite ok for 1800 bugs.

Again, it's not the number of bugs that is important. Another question
to ask is, do we have the bandwidth to fix all the issues that we find?
We are going to find issues. Coordinating the work between 30 developers
isn't feasible. We need to coordinate the work within sub teams. At the
moment we use projects to track the work within a team. If we don't have
projects, we need something else. So the result of the experiment will
either be that we quickly revert, or that we make it possible to track
the work of a single team. The latter would of course be really good,
but who will do that work? Given the current strategic focus, is this
something that we want to spend a few developer cycles one?


-- 
Björn Tillenius | https://launchpad.net/~bjornt