Archives for posts with tag: Sprint

I replied to an email today explaining my usual formula for organizing a developer sprint. While typing I thought I might as well blog about it so others can clone it too. Please, comment if you think I forgot something.

On the Edge by Wendy on flickr

On the Edge by Wendy on flickr

Set a Date

First figure out which weekend will fit most possible attendees. Propose no more than three different ones in the beginning or you will never come to an agreement. The last one should be about eight weeks away for a normal amount of organization, like finding accomodation and booking trips.

To make your life easier while coming to an agreement on the date, use a tool like Doodle or set up a simple table on a wiki. And set a deadline. (weiterlesen…)

After an extremely productive and rather well planned Saturday, we kept Sunday for discussions in small groups. The Krita developers moved to the sofas and helped Lukas to clarify the first steps of his SoC project. After a while the moved on to different topics and I read through pages of the WordPress documentation to find solutions to open questions regarding the website. I didn’t get half as much done as I wanted – not quite surprisingly – but I fixed some minor annoyances and talked to Danimo who popped by eventually how to split up both the existing and hopefully soon new created content between main page, wiki, user- and techbase.

During the whole weekend I sensed positive vibes coming from the core developers who were relieved to have finally released. For me, this is the biggest improvement compared to the sprint we had last November. The announcement of Jos van den Oever as first full time developer working on KOffice (who brought great drops!) and the rather high amount of completely new faces surely added to the good mood.

Thanks go to Cyrille for his excellent release management that lead to 2.0 and agenda planning for the sprint, to Thomas for the lovley stickers and postcards, to KDAB who were kind enough to host us at their office and provide us with enough coffee and to the KDE e.V. for sponsoring the whole event. And of course, to everybody who came to Berlin to contribute, discuss and learn.

It’s this time again.

Technically, we started last night already with team building (aka socializing aka dinner) but today is the first day of real work. We were kindly invited into the KDAB office in Berlin-Kreuzberg again and I have the strong feeling that Inge is seriously aiming for killing the coffee reserve.

We went through various presentations already (see Hanna’s blog for details) which lead to very interesting discussions. I don’t even get a third of the content but I am tweaking the new website in the meantime.

Or maybe I should just sleep another hour. Breakfast at 8 is so not my time…

Now that I had the time to recover from all this sprint stress and after two nearly contentless blogs, I thought I might go into details which results we actually achieved.

Inge, Jos, Sebas and me spend our time on working on a marketing strategy for the new KOffice – as you might have read before. Of course, I won’t share our plans here, but the attentive observer of this highly interesting project will most probably come across the neat messages we worked out. We ended up with a nice list of strong selling points and I’m sure that the final release will show that this office suite has a lot of potential, even if the 2.0 version will not be perfect.

Less confidential but not less interesting is the feedback I got on my web concept. Actually it was bought by everybody, only minor issues had to be addressed. We still need to make a final decision on the system we want to use for the landing page – which includes quite some googleing for me – but chances are high that I will come up with something easy to use, easy to maintain and pretty. Thanks to JarosÅ‚aw for pointing me into a new direction. I hope this might be useful as test case for other projects, especially the lifestream system to show the whole activity around one project that happens anywhere on the net.

It was very interesting for me to meet all those people I only knew from IRC, if at all, and see how they think, work and talk. And I finally understood the usefulness of chatting on IRC while being in the same room: one gets the attention of those that keep staring onto their screen…