[TYPO3-dev] not amused...

[Francois Suter]

Hi Dan,

I think you're making some very good points here.

> The tough part for the release manager is how little control he/she has 
> over the development, since most of it is volunteer work. If a planned 
> feature is not complete by the deadline, what can you do?

Indeed, this is open source and keeping people focused is really a 
full-time job. So we would need release managers that are ready to work 
a good part of their time (if not full-time) for the duration of the 
release development (not aftwerwards, for maintenance). But this would 
have to be paid, obviously.

> I believe that Ingo has done a terrific job in completing 4.2, and Olly 
> is managing 4.3 very well, even if it is behind the original schedule 
> (things change).

I would rather say that they did their best. This is not a criticism. 
It's just that I think that in terms of project management, it was not 
good work. But it's the best anyone could have done given the 
conditions. I could see that with sponsored projects (or at least with 
the one that got sponsored, the new FORM object): part of my tasks were 
to follow the project development, which means checking what the 
developer was doing, checking with the sponsors that they were satisfied 
and doing their part (namely testing and validating). All this took far 
more time than we thought initially and I ended up not doing it, which 
explains a part of the delay (but not all), as some problems lingered 
for far too long.

So, yes, project (=release) management takes a lot of time, which means 
it should be paid for, so that people can spend the appropriate amount 
of time doing it. This in turns means that it may be difficult to change 
release manager with every release, but this is probably going too far 
into details for now.

Cheeers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch