launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,
UDS-P was an interesting and productive experience for those of us on
the Launchpad team who attended. We were:
 * Francis * Curtis * Dan * Diogo (Monday, Tuesday) * and me. This
doubled-up as Dan's induction sprint and was also my first UDS as
ProductManager; a baptism by fire for both of us :)
I won't go into everything we did or every session we attended; mostly
because it wouldn't be that relevant. Also, I won't be writing about
general UDS stuff. Instead, I'll pick out some personal
Launchpad-related highlights and invite others to chip in.
Monday, Francis and I unintentionally hijacked the Translations
Round-table. Our presence meant that it quickly became a, "What do you
want from Launchpad Translations?" session.
We invited suggestions for what we should do in the next 12-18 months
on Launchpad Translations. I asked that people bend their suggestions
towards improvements for the translator. We've done a lot of work over
the past couple of years that has great potential for projects but
perhaps, as a result, we've neglected the people doing the day-to-day
translation.
We were directed to this page:
  https://dev.launchpad.net/Translations/Reports/ThreeWishes4.0  The
consensus in the session seemed to be that, if we're aiming to improve
the translator's experience, from that list we should aim for:
 * Feedback: think of this like code review for translations. *
Translation memory: similar to glossaries, to help translation teams
communicate their preferred vocabulary to new translators and ensure
consistency. * Package set views: a way, not necessarily that way, to
group together Ubuntu translations so that a new translator is not
overwhelmed. Also, the issue of how useful the translation statistics
for each language are. The suggestion came that it might be more
helpful, primarily in promoting Ubuntu to the speakers of particular
languages, to show how well translated the desktop experience is. Many
languages offer a near faultless native experience on the desktop but,
due to little translation of less consumer-oriented tools, show a
fairly low percentage translated.
Throughout the week we had a number of discussions about how Launchpad
can best help Canonical's Ubuntu Engineering department to best
represent their workflows. The discussion went through requests for
more bug statuses, fewer bug statuses, mpt apologising for the Fix
Committed status, and so on. In the end, Ursula offered to help record
the different workflows used by teams within Ubuntu Engineering and
report back at the co-located Launchpad Thunderdome/Ubuntu Engineering
Rally in January.
Another theme that spread across several meetings was the ingenuity
shown by various people in pulling data out of Launchpad. It's pretty
clear that people need more reports on the data that matters to them.
As for how we better support them, there are a couple of main options:
improve the API or offer greater reporting customisation in the UI.
Other things that happened, include:
 * there was a general desire to see code review and code hosting
improved: UI stuff mostly
 * many people asked for native Git hosting
 * people want blueprints to get some love: I was pleased to be able
to say that we plan to create one issue tracker with answers, bug, and
blueprint faces
 * people value Answers and mailing lists and want them to improve *
we worked with those stakeholders who make use of private bugs to best
understand how to move away from the model we have now to the new
model offered by the Better Privacy project * Dan did lots of user
research * Diogo and Dan did a live demo of the custom bug listings
feature and got some useful feedback * Marc demonstrated the results
tracker and we ended up with Dan and Huw getting involved in the
interaction design * James and Monty from OpenStack gave a talk where
they showed how they'd moved to Git but continued using Launchpad. I
came away with the feeling that Launchpad has an exciting future.
People at UDS are really engaged in Launchpad. Launchpad can play a
vital role in the direction that Ubuntu and Canonical are taking: for
example, better integration with the efforts to build a richer app
ecosyste for Ubuntu.
The coming stakeholder meeting will help us know better what the next
18 months of Launchpad feature development will look like.
Cheers!

-- 
Matthew Revell
Launchpad Product Manager
Canonical

https://launchpad.net/~matthew.revell