Ubuntu Developers Sprint - August 2006

Dates

The next distro sprint will take place from 09.00 Monday 21st - 17.30 Friday 25th August 2006, Please arrange to arrive on Sunday 20th and depart Saturday 26th.

Venue

The venue will be Hotel Achat, Wiesbaden, Germany http://www.achat-hotels.de/wEnglisch/02_hotels/Uebersicht_Hotels/26_Uebersicht.php?navid=26

How to Get There

The nearest airport is Frankfurt. You can find instructions on how to get to the hotel from the airport from this link http://www.achat-hotels.de/wEnglisch/02_hotels/Anfahrt_Lage/26_Anfahrt_Lage.php

Although anyone is welcome to attend, the sprint is a face-to-face work session for the development team, and takes place before feature freeze to provide an opportunity to finish off projects before the deadline. It's not a spectator event, but a hands-on developer event.

Attendees

Agenda

Development

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/edgy/+specs

• Edgy goals: The Reckoning. It's time to make a decision on goals which are behind on progress, and drop goals which aren't going to make the feature freeze deadline (7 September). My proposed format for this is to sit with each of you individually for perhaps 30-60 minutes to review your progress in depth, bringing in third parties as appropriate where there are dependencies involved.
  • Each goal will fall into one of three categories: keep, defer or rescue. Rescue means that the goal is in trouble, but we think we may be able to rescue it by putting our heads together in a group session.
• Rescue missions. As above, these will be largish group sessions focused on rescuing a particular Edgy project. We'll identify blocking issues, brainstorm solutions to them, and take a final decision on whether we can reasonably pursue the goal for the release.
• Hack sessions. These will be focused, pairwise or small group work sessions. They will usually be related to a feature goal, but
  • infrastructure projects are also appropriate where we have time.

    If you want to ensure that you have time reserved with some of your teammates for such a session, list it here

  • LibAtaForAtaDisks - ScottJamesRemnant, ColinWatson (yaboot)

  • AutomatedProblemReports - MartinPitt, BenCollins, SebastienBacher

  • AptElfDebugSymbols - MartinPitt (with AdamConrad in IRC, preferably)

  • NoMoreDevfs - ColinWatson, ScottJamesRemnant

  • OLPC planning - mdz, Rodrigo, Colin, Mark
• Your ideas here

Process Discussions

These will be group sessions (some for the entire team) about process questions: how and when particular tasks should be performed, and how we'll ensure that they happen regularly and efficiently.

• [done] Archive administration (mdz, archive admin team, et al)

  • queue/new processing
  • buildd operations
  • backports

• [done] Release management (mdz, colin, tollef, et al)

  • Stop the pain
  • Scheduling milestones
  • Stable release updates

• [done] Artwork workflow (mdz, dholbach, riddell, fschoep, kwwii, et al)

• Developer relations (mdz, all)
  • REVU - who and when?
  • Responding to community input (e.g., ubuntu-devel) - who and when?
  • Brainstorm - attracting new developers

• [done] Bug workflow (sfllaw, all)

  • Triage process
  • Handoff to developers
  • Launchpad workflow (milestones, release targeting, etc.)
• Feature showcases (mdz, all)

  • Mark has asked that we create a process to showcase features in development. The basic idea is that the assignee will present a short user-oriented explanation of the feature and its rationale, and lead a brief Q&A discussion with the community around it.

  • We'll discuss the format, location, timing and responsibility for these sessions
• Your ideas here

Bug Day

As a followup to the bug workflow process discussion, I'd like to hold a full-blown bug day during the sprint. This may not end up being exactly a day, but I want to put the process into practice while we're still together. Naturally, the community will participate as well. We can also use this time to dedicate developer time to particularly difficult and severe bugs as nominated by Simon and the QA team in advance.

Goals

At the end of the sprint, we should have:

• Refined your Edgy goals, with a rationale and roadmap for each which is deferred or rescued
• Notes / partial drafts for the process items
• Put a measurable dent in the Edgy bug list
• NOT lost any laptops, been thrown out of any public establishments, spread any viruses, or taken part in other disasters
• Enjoyed ourselves immensely