software-store-developers team mailing list archive

[Gary Lasker <gary.lasker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Software Center devs!

As many of you know from UDS discussions, we as Software Center
developers are part of a Canonical-based upstream project and as such we
will need to move to a somewhat more formal process for our development
in the Precise cycle. This is based on an initiative that Rick Spencer
introduced at UDS and that he's calling the Ubuntu Acceptance Criteria.
As you know, Rick heads the Ubuntu Engineering team and so is ultimately
responsible for the quality of the distribution. The idea of the
Acceptance Criteria is to formalize the upstream development processes a
bit with the goal of reducing the chance of bugs or regressions creeping
into the distribution, even during the development cycle. The goal is a
daily ISO that is always installable and always working.

And make no mistake, the idea here is to increase development velocity
by increasing code quality and knowledge sharing, etc. It is most
definitely *not* intended to slow things down with heavyweight
processes. In fact, the changes for our team will likely be fairly
minimal as we already have all of the important pieces in place in our
process today (code reviews, automatic unit tests, etc.).

Further, we, as a team, have the freedom to implement the processes in
such a way as we see fit to make them work best for *our team*. The idea
is to *increase* the enjoyment and satisfaction we all get from our work
on Software Center. If at any point anyone feels like the opposite is
happening, let's talk about it right away and fix it.

For background, here's the wiki page describing the new Acceptance Criteria:

 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuEngineering/12.04/UpstreamDevelopment

And here is the page that describes the various upstream projects
involved, including Software Center:


https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuEngineering/12.04/UpstreamDevelopment/ProjectTracking

Finally, as kiwinote and nzmm already know (as they were sitting with me
after a UDS session), Jason Warner asked me to write up a wiki document
describing our development policies, as the other upstream projects have
been doing.

If you have some time, I'd appreciate if you could look this document
over and let's have a discussion about anything that you think ought to
change or that I did not get right. You'll note the document is labeled
a "draft", that's because it will not be final until it reflects the
policies as defined by our entire team, not just one member.

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter/ProjectPolicies

Thanks! As always, you guys ROCK!!
Gary