yellow team mailing list archive

[Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I hadn't realized Henning was leaving. :-(  If you have someone in a roughly European timezone whom you think might fit into Launchpad, the job position should be open soon.

I expect to be out this coming Monday and Tuesday to visit my grandmother and father.

We looked at the remaining escalated bugs.  He said that he didn't feel pressure on them yet, so we could discriminate based on our own desires.  If we wanted to tackle them, bug 57418 ("Support debtags in Packages.gz") might be a good soyuz bug to tackle, and 747558 ("PPAs should create backtracable packages") might be just a bit harder.

That said, I then expressed concern about the lack of expertise we had in code hosting.  He agreed.  I'd like us to build up some code hosting experience and knowledge in the yellow squad.  Pertinent tags are code-import, code-integration, and codehosting-ssh.  I'd like at least two of us (probably including me) to review the bugs and then ask Tim or Michael for a code hosting overview and a pre-imp for some bugs we think we can tackle.

Francis pointed me to http://leanandkanban.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/demings-14-points/ since he and I had talked about this in the past, and he knows I am interested in Lean.  You might find it interesting as well.

In that context, he mentioned that he was unpleasantly surprised to see that Robert got the "Spotlight on Success" award.  Robert certainly is doing an excellent and indeed exceptional job, but Francis had already communicated to the Launchpad team leads and to Elliot that research showed these sorts of programs to be alienating and discouraging, and a net loss.  We were not participating.  Someone selected and approved Robert over Francis' head.  Francis still feels the way he did before about the program, and we are still not nominating anyone.

Francis will be out on vacation for two weeks, August 1-12.  Since I'm out on Tuesday  of next week, I'll have a make-up call with him Wed at 10AM Eastern.

I talked with Francis about our sprint.  I wondered why we were having ome and other teams were not.  He said that the feature was considered critical, so Elliot thought that it made sense for us to have it.  Future one-off sprints will be considered individually.  I also said that we were generally more interested in going to a pretty beach than going to Lexington, MA, but I understood why that was potentially valuable.  He understood and said maybe we could have an someone from Lexington join us at the beach, but I interpreted the following laughter we shared as "ha ha, isn't that a sympathetic joke!"  But maybe I'm cynical and it could really happen. :-)  I expect it would be noticeably cheaper to rent the hotel and drive to the beach, so maybe we could really sell it…well, I'm still skeptical.

OK, there may be more, but this is already long, so I'll close.  Thanks for reading.

Gary