Re: ’Pond Jobs & Their Descriptions

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi Kieren,

czw., 6 lut 2020 o 00:55 Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden>
napisał(a):

> Hello all!
>
> I’m curious as to all the various jobs/tasks required to keep Lilypond
> development moving forward at the fastest possible pace and in the most
> efficient possible way. Is there a single list compiled anywhere, written
> with an eye to extreme granularity? (The closest I can find is <
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/contributor/help-us>, and the
> 9 bullet points there are at least an order of magnitude fewer than the
> list I’m thinking of.) If not, I’ll start a list, brainstormed from my
> naïve perspective.
>

I appreciate the initiative, and I agree that we could use a clearer view
on the responsibilities and skills needed in the community. However, I am
pretty sure that creating a detailed list is not an effective way of
solving this problem. I'm pretty sure that we'd spend a *lot* of time on
discussion and even if we agree on the results, it'll be even more work to
implement the processes, and until it's ready there would be no tangible
benefits. My whole professional experience taught me that such
planning-heavy approaches are costly and often fail.

Do you know about agile methodologies? In short, they are about doing work
iteratively: instead of making a detailed plan and following it (usually
until you discover midway that, because of missing data, half of the plan
doesn't make sense), start with setting a small self-contained goal,
complete it (with only basic planning), and when you're done you take step
back to include what you've learned in the process. It usually yields much
better results. You may find this link helpful (but I suggest that you
don't go on reading everything on that site):
https://www.atlassian.com/agile/manifesto

Therefore I suggest to apply the Pareto principle (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle) and do something much more
lightweight. For example, I suggest to ask this question: what are the 3
areas where LP community is most "shortstaffed"? (e.g. do we need more
people to do patch review, testing automation, whatever?). Once we discover
that, I would go on asking "what's the one thing that would make it
easier/more attractive to contribute in that area". Boom, 2 weeks later we
actually have some specific improvements.


czw., 6 lut 2020 o 01:21 Graham Percival <address@hidden>
napisał(a):

> On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 06:55:38PM -0500, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
>
>     (c) help new developers find the best way in to the 'Pond.
>
> I'm not up to date on current LilyPond,


Whoah, Graham! Nice to see you, man! Long time no see :-)


> but I suspect that the
> answer is "try to find developers willing to mentor".


I'm willing to mentor, as I've committed to improving LP contributor
experience (even though not much happened on that front from my side, as I
got sidetracked by huge CoC discussion).

BTW do you remember that about 8 years ago I promised you to mentor some
"Frogs" when my patch for shortened flags will be merged? It's still not
done, but whatever, I want to keep my promise ;-)

Best,
Janek