launchpadblog

We’ve made some changes to how we organise the Launchpad team!

We’re no longer divided into application-based teams (Bugs, Code, Foundations, Registry, Soyuz and Translations). Instead, we now have five cross-domain engineering squads: three focused on features and two on
maintenance.

How does this affect you?

When you want to speak to someone about a specific part of Launchpad,
whether for help, to escalate something or about an operational issue,
things have changed a little.

Specifically:

• For help and any other operational issues related to Launchpad, you should either send an email to the launchpad-users mailing list, or file a question on the Launchpad project.  (Reminder: these forums are public.)
• If your request would benefit from interactive discussions, drop by in#launchpad on Freenode where one of the people working on the maintenance squads will be able to help you. If your request isn’t suitable for public consumption, you can reach the same people on the #launchpad-ops channel onthe private Canonical IRC server.
• To prioritize feature requests and to escalate other bugs, you should contact our product strategist.
• You can also always bounce ideas to the developers list.

Short-term, we also expect some churn as people are exposed to areas they weren’t used to before. But down-the-line, we’ll have much more distributed knowledge coverage across the whole application.

How the squads work

The squads will alternate between “development project” and “maintenance” modes.

The three development squads will work on longer term projects, usually resulting in new functionality. Once such a squad has finished a project they’ll swap places with one of the two maintenance squads.

Bugs, operational issues and so on will be taken care of by the maintenance squads.

Deciding which development projects to take on will remain the responsibility of our strategist (Jonathan Lange) in collaboration with the Launchpad Stakeholders group.

You can find a list of who is in each squad on our dev wiki.

Why are we doing this?

Our app-based teams served us well, but were becoming a liability:

• Many parts of Launchpad, such as Blueprint, didn’t have a dedicated team and were basically unmaintained.
• Each team was responsible for both new features within their app as wel as maintenance. That slowed both of these.
• Projects that required cross-app integration suffered from hand-off and coordination problem.

With this new structure, we expect to see:

• Better cohesion across the application, as one squad will be responsible for the implementation of new aspects across the whole application.
• Reduced cycle-time both for bug fixes and for new features as the context-switching will be removed.

It will be my pleasure to answer any questions you might have regarding this reorg.

This entry was posted by Francis J. Lacoste on Monday, January 31st, 2011 at 8:00 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.