Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2013-12-02

Quick retrospective on the November goals

• Guillaume, Quim and Andre quickly went over their goals and accomplishments for November

Planning Quick overview of the December goals

• Guillaume, Quim and Andre quickly went over their planned goals for December

Quim: Let's go through the Jan Mar quarterly goals next week.

Tools discussion

Quim: what is the problem we want to solve?

Andre: as discussed on the team-practices mailing list: we're starting to have many tools like bugzilla, RT, Trello, Mingle. Each team likes their tool for various reasons. Some teams have moved from one tool to another. Long-term plan: agree on 1 or 2 tools, preferably open-source. Big question: how much are the teams willing to compromise?

Chris: teams using Mingle are starting to move away away from our self-hosted instance, to a hosted instance (by ThoughtWorks, makers of Mingle)

Quim: ECT's work is to facilitate a discussion in order to reach to a common reference. The Gerrit discussion served to find a reference that was enforced. Here we are not trying to enforce anything, although we hope that the reference helps new projects and teams to choose them.

How to get there?

• This month: define the field:
  • requirements we're considering
  • options we're considering
• All that coming from a community discussion on the team-practices list
• Next quarter: discuss, discuss, discuss, agree on the list of requirements and agree on the One Single Tool. And ideally, start implementation, show something in Labs

Andre: summarize discussions on the team-practices list, define a set of criteria and use it to build a table and see what tools meet them

Quim: There is going to be plenty of room for bikeshedding, and it's our role to prevent bikeshedding. We shouldn't have an opinion about the tool but our goal is to guide and facilitate the decision process. We need to identify the primary stakeholders: RobLa, Arthur Richards, S Page, and other people who are interested but don't need to be as involved in the process

One possible split of responsibilities for Andre and Guillaume: Andre starts discussions and facilitates them, Guillaume summarizes and documents (using <ref>s to avoid cyclic discussions). Guillaume will also see what we can reuse from the previous discussions that happened over the past few years.