Via
reddit (which kicks the crap out of slashdot and digg):
What I've Learned From Failure.
The link above is a long, but fascinating piece. I've had to become a lot more interested in how to manage software projects since taking on Xorg maintainance, and the same lessons seem to scale up well to how Debian as a whole manages itself. This article talks about some of the major problems that I've seen myself deal with, and the experiences of this guy echo my own over the past year very strongly. Here's a few examples:
"Getting away from weak teams, another source of failure is the omnipresent threat of "chickens." A chicken is not necessarily a weak individual, but a sign of a weak management structure. A chicken is an individual who has significant authority over your project, but does not make a personal commitment to the success of the project. Significant authority includes the authority to impose constraints on the team."
I like this and I've noticed it in the XSF and in Debian as a whole. People are free to work on what they want how they want, and this tends to work out well for us. But we also have no structure in which people must actually commit to what they do. As such, there's no accountability. This frees Debian developers from the preassure of having to work on something they don't enjoy, but it also creates abandoned packages, ignored bugs, and frustrated release schedules.
In the past I've described a need for a stick in addition to a carrot for Debian developers, and the sentiment here echoes that idea. I've spoken with
Manoj about his conception of personal responsibility in Debian, and I think it may truly be the bedrock on which Debian needs to rest. I still don't have a good mechanism for this yet though.
"Another sign of a weak team is poor development hygiene. There are dozens of development practices that seem trivial to the inexperienced outsider or to the manager focusing on "big wins." Examples of development hygiene include source code versioning, maintenance of an accurate bug or issue database, significant use of automated testing, continuous integration, and specifications that are kept current (whether incredibly detailed or high-level overviews)."
This is a something I myself have had a problem with over the past year. Branden was extremely good about keeping the XSF svn repo and the BTS up to date and well managed. I've done just about the opposite over the past year, and it's bitten me a few times. This however, was a conscious decision on my part, knowing that I was so far behind upstream that it was going to be hard to effectively manage the BTS without a recent codebase deployed to our users. So I focused on packaging instead, and luckily that road is nearly finished. Also fortunately, everyone else in the XSF managed the BTS for me, most notably (in alphabetical order by last name) Julien Cristau, Michel D nzer, Eugene Konev, and David Martinez Moreno, and they've managed to keep it relatively tidy. I'm going to spend some serious effort over the coming months to clean out the BTS so it's more manageable both for users and developers again. Luckly our SVN repo is in good shape still, so for the most part we're doing pretty well here. Debian as a whole also seems to be doing better at this, with lots of public svn repos springing up on alioth.
"It's mandatory to fail early. You need to know you're in trouble right away. That's essential when taking over an existing project or starting something new. You have to find out how you're doing within weeks. Not quarters, not months. The longer you wait, the more inertia the failure will have."
We're getting better at this, and I've sort of made it my mantra for this release cycle. Get things in to experimental as fast as possible, and then when I've fixed the majority of the bugs that show up there, put it in unstable as fast as possible. It worked out well for all the releases I've done so far and I'm going to keep doing it. Michel is really pushing me to keep CVS (or git as of Real Soon Now) snapshots from upstream in experimental, and I really like this idea and plan to follow through with it for this reason. This also echoes some of
aj's ideas about speeding up development pace. Hopefully he'll implement them whether or not he becomes DPL, because I think they're going to be important for Debian as a whole.
"Dates are sacred."
We learned this during the sarge release cycle.
"The net result is that I've tried to find the happy medium where I generate weekly management reports on projects. A management report is something that is used to actually make a decision. Everything else is garbage. I've learned that when I haven't had management reports for a project, failure has resulted."
This is an interesting idea. It sort of echoes how I try and provide status updates on my blog, as well as the "Bits from" emails, but perhaps something more like this would be useful. I may try and play with this idea in the near future.
There's a lot more in there, but this entry already got way too long. Hopefully there's some food for thought in there for everyone who's interested in how Debian is run. The Debian development model has carried us very far, but I can't shake the feeling that we need to make some critical changes for it to continue. This will require a certain degree of boldness, but in order to fix the problems with the project I think we just need to clench our teeth and go for it. With that, I'll leave you with one last line from the above: "And if you decide to make changes, have the courage to go 100% with your gut. I've failed more than once when I watered down my convictions in order to appease dissenters. The only thing worse than evangelizing change and failing is looking back and realized you might have succeeded if you'd held firm on your convictions."
