What are the Boosters up to?

2010/01/26/ 0 comment(s) / openSUSE
These posts are here to keep you informed about what the openSUSE Boosters team is up to. The openSUSE Boosters are a team of dedicated people helping parts of the project to take of. It consists of 13 people (BTW: widely known as the thirsty thirteen) with skills ranging from low level C hackery over Ruby on Rails mastering to Graphical Design or Project Management. The team picks its own milestones and works on them in a agile fashion.

General Things

First of all some general things. We are currently evaluating a project management tool called Retrospectiva. It supposed help us with two things: Keeping track of our work and inform people, in depth, about it. The first part is coming along pretty nicely already. In December we met and agreed on terminology and a way to use the tool. We will work on Milestones, that consist of one or more Goals which consist one or more Stories. Each Milestone can have one or more Sprints which are time boxes stretching for  2 weeks. In the last couple of weeks Michal pushed some patches that implemented features we missed upstream. Henne transfered all data from our test project to the one we want to seriously use now. And Darix is working on the deployment of the new version to the community.o.o host which is currently prepared by Berthold Gunreben from the Autobuild Team as a XEN instance. Of course there are still several things to do. The squad leaders need to take care of their milestone descriptions to be very specific and from the customers view so people can actually understand them. Also we have to check the transferred data that got migrated and darix needs to deploy the head branch and push Berthold to finish the server. Because of our general goal to create a lot of buzz about what we do we need to attach a default story “make buzz about it” to every goal. Michal is looking into that.

For everybody’s favourite FOSS show FOSDEM in February we are ready to go. Boosters have 4 talks on the distro devroom’s schedule:

Another show in desperate need on Booster Talks is LinuxTag 2010. Their call for papers is running and every booster shoud put in a talk! There are instructions on the CFP about what they are interested in, what topics they want to focus on, what is expected of speakers and how to submit a talk. So all of us are currently thinking about what we could talk about to the FOSS community.

In general we talked a lot about how we can make more buzz about what we do.  We agreed that the least we can do is to write something to our own mailinglist so other boosters are aware of what you are doing. The next steps would be to keep the parts of the project up to date that you are working in (OBS, Wiki, Web) via reports to their mailinglist and then tell the world what you do via your blog/lizards/news. Henne got the action item to push out our sprint meeting minutes to other channels than our own mailinglist. And NO goal should be closed without reporting about it to the world. We also have to think about how to use Retrospectiva for this.

Standup Meetings

We also run so called Standup Meetings where every squad has to stand up and tell the others what they did do in the last sprint, what they are planning to do in the next sprint and what currently blocks them.

For the Centralized Developer Documentation squad this was for the first sprint this year:

What we have done:
The general wiki transition has gone forward. There are transition guidelines, the new instance is deployed, working and tested. Currently there are some bugs blocking the transition related to some extensions. Nearly all the templates are in place and the wiki meta documentation is starting to shape up.

What we want to do:
We will create a portal and go on from there. Collect all developer documentation and transfer it to the new instance.

What is blocking us:
The bugs that block the general transition.

The Factory Status Page squad also had a lot to report:

What we have done:
80% of the milestone is done. The old factory page that coolo implemented is nearly transferred into the OBS. It’s not “live” in the master branch yet but deployed on the staging instance of the OBS web client. The development also introduced some new features in general like requests for the project page, build status popups for submit requests or the forward submit requests button.

What we want to do:
Smaller things: code cleanup, get some more information onto the page without showing it by default. Outdated package version information

What is blocking us:
We don’t want to and can’t be in the 1.7 release so we are waiting with merging until this is out of the door. But before we have to split some things like the new css and so on.

The squad that cares about unifying the openSUSE web experience (they call it Umbrella Project) reported the following:

What we have done:
On the theme side nothing happened because robert is offline. On the technical side we investigated solutions to incorporate. The investigation phase is done now.

What we want to do:
Document the results of the investigations and then start to implement.

What is blocking us:
Nothing at the moment

Thats it for now. Expect to hear from us again as FOSDEM gets nearer, and when the public Retrospectiva instance is ready. Until then, we’ll be hard at work making openSUSE a better place to contribute your Free Software time.  And remember, if you want to join the Boosters, or just hang out with us, come to #opensuse-boosters on FreeNode!

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