Open Stack

Eoghan Glynn wrote:
>> On 08/07/2014 01:41 PM, Eoghan Glynn wrote:
>>> My point was simply that we don't have direct control over the
>>> contributors' activities
>>
>> This is not correct and I've seen it repeated too often to let it go
>> uncorrected: we (the OpenStack project as a whole) have a lot of control
>> over contributors to OpenStack. There is a Technical Committee and a
>> Board of Directors, corporate members and sponsors... all of these can
>> do a lot to make things happen. For example, the Platinum members of the
>> Foundation are required at the moment to have at least 'two full time
>> equivalents' and I don't see why the board couldn't change that
>> requirement, make it more specific.
>>
>> OpenStack is not an amateurish project done by volunteers in their free
>> time.  We have lots of leverage we can apply to get things done.
> 
> There was no suggestion of amatuerish-ness, or even volunteerism,
> in my post.
> 
> Simply a recognition of the reality that we are not operating in
> a traditional command & control environment.

I agree with Eoghan here. The main goal of an agile/lean system is to
maximize a development team productivity. The main goal of Open source
project management is not to maximize productivity. It’s to maximize
contributions. I wrote about that a few years ago here (shameless plug):

http://fnords.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/agile-vs-open/

The problem today is that our backlog/inventory/waste has reached levels
where it starts hurting our goal of maximizing contributions, by
creating frustration on the developers side. So we need to explore ways
to reduce it back to acceptable (or predictable) levels, taking into
account our limited control over our workforce.

Personally I think we just need to get better at communicating the
downstream expectations, so that if we create waste, it's clearly
upstream fault rather than downstream. Currently it's the lack of
communication that makes developers produce more / something else than
what core reviewers want to see. Any tool that lets us communicate
expectations better is welcome, and I think the runway approach is one
such tool, simple enough to understand.

Cheers,

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)