linaro-project-management team mailing list archive

[Deepak Saxena <dsaxena@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 19 September 2011 11:28, James Westby <james.westby@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Sep 2011 11:06:53 -0700, Deepak Saxena <dsaxena@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> The kernel team is planning on setting  aside a session at LC'Q4 to
>> just discuss the BP/WI process and how we can find ways to make it
>> better map to the upstream kernel process where things can be blocked
>> for days, weeks, or longer waiting on someone we have no control over
>> and where a task is decomposed into many smaller tasks that keep
>> adding delay to something being "done" (for example, single zImage is
>> likely going to be a 9-12 month project to get fully baked and working
>> as we keep finding more pieces to work on).
>>
>> I'd like to in addition to just an open summit session on this subject
>> propose that we have a separate PM and tech lead only discussion
>> to dig deeper into this topic in an organisational-wide capacity. Mounir,
>> since you're working with several WGs, would you be able to work
>> with me to gather an agenda for this? Should this be scheduled
>> outside of the summit system or can we use it to schedule private
>> meetings?
>
> Why make this a private meeting?

too many cooks....

I think it is important to have an open discussion with as many engineers
 across different WGs present, but I think there needs to be a smaller
group of people driving the decisions on how we move forward. From
what I can tell, we have two problems we're trying to solve when
it comes to tracking work:

1. Managing the work we are doing, planning, understanding team load, etc

2. Providing a marketing tool to show value to our members.

I think (1) is a conversation of interest to engineers and I think BPs/WIs
are a good tool if used gently.

I think engineers really don't care about (2) as they just want to do
interesting work and I think connecting the BPs/WIs to status.linaro.org,
which is in my opinion primarily a marketing tool, is not something
that works. We need to find a different way to track progress in
a way that is presentable to the TSC and I don't know that we
need everyone's involvement in that conversation.

Thanks,
~Deepak