launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

["Francis J. Lacoste" <francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On December 2, 2009, Robert Collins wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-12-02 at 10:23 +0000, Jonathan Lange wrote:
> > I agree that we need to be able to coordinate work by teams smaller
> > than "all the Launchpad committers".
> >
> > However, I do think that ideally, we'd be modelling this by using
> > teams. At the moment, we are modelling it with projects. I don't think
> > there is any real sense in which, malone say, is a separate *project*
> > from registry. It grates on me that we model it that way in Launchpad.
> > Ideally, we'd have one project (launchpad) and many teams, and work
> > could be coordinated through teams. Would you agree with this?
> 
> I'm not entirely sure I agree with /needing/ to coordinate work on teams
> smaller than 'all the launchpad committers'. 

Well, it didn't start out that way. And we did put some structure because it 
wasn't working well even at the level of ~18-20. (Can't remember exactly at 
what count we switched.)

> I know that we *do*
> coordinate work on smaller teams, but its not clear to me that we need
> to - or that if we do, that the lines are sliced in the correct
> dimensions. (For instance we have pillar slicing today for some subteams
> (bugs, code, translations, soyuz), layers for others (design,
> foundations), no slicing for others (everyone is a reviewer).
> 
> The crux of the thing, for me, is Conway's law:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law
> 
> If we really want Launchpad to be working as a smooth application,
> rather than a bunch of things that sometimes work together, I think we'd
> be a lot better off with a single team, shared vision and shared goals.
> 

And I think we can all agree on that point. That's the main reason we drove to 
One Strategic Vision for Launchpad at the London Team Leads meeting 2 months 
ago. And we are seeing a lot more coordination across teams since then. (We 
are far from saying mission accomplished there, but the direction is right I 
think.)

> The major points raised against doing this were about information
> overload, AIUI. I *don't* have good answers for this today, but I'd love
> it if we explored it further.
> 

Again I think we can agree on this. In today's TL call, we decided that 
"improving visibility" into each team goals and work was very important to 
reduce that overload. Brian, our new project manager, is set-up to help each 
team structure a dash board to help with this, and also to manage a global 
dashboard for Launchpad. That's the first step, next ones will be to improve 
tooling in this area, but we felt we needed to address the problem in a simple 
way now!

Looking forward on the results of this.

-- 
Francis J. Lacoste
francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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