In the PMWG, that is what we ended up doing. 1 week before LDS, everything that was still pending was postponed to the next cycle so that work could begin in earnest on planning and *thinking* about the goals for the next cycle.
With the proposed monthly releases, I guess the cadence with Ubuntu becomes moot except where things are delivered into Ubuntu or explicitly required from Ubuntu. My view is that for the most part, Platform team has closer coupling to the Ubuntu release than the working groups.
Regards, Amit
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Jesse Barker jesse.barker@linaro.org wrote:
To add to Alexandros' thoughts, we typically have our public plan reviews a couple of weeks after LDS, which means that for the most part, all engineering blueprints for the coming cycle must be done by then (before then for the benefit of those compiling the slides, etc. for the plan reviews ;-). So, the idea that work on the closing cycle can still be ongoing even by the week before LDS is almost an illusion.
Some of this might point to the idea that if we've done our jobs planning and scoping appropriately, no remaining work items will be deep or complex so that the LDS pre-preplanning and the output processing that goes on afterward (yet before the official end of cycle) will interrupt us. Of course, it's not a perfect world, so we may not get the smoothest of transitions, but we should at least be able to improve the transition with each passing cycle.
cheers, Jesse
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 9:54 AM, Alexandros Frantzis alexandros.frantzis@linaro.org wrote:
Hi all,
I completely missed the Linaro release process session during LDS, but here are my thoughts on the Linaro development cycle.
Currently, the Linaro cycle lags behind the Ubuntu cycle by one month. This is done so that the Linaro releases are based on a stable system.
Unfortunately, this scheme causes some disruption for me (and I suspect for other engineers, too). The problem is that while the current Linaro cycle is still ongoing, we need to start planning for next-cycle/LDS, attend LDS and after that investigate some more and create the specifications. This is hard and time consuming work and I am sure not many people (including me) can continue to work effectively on their remaining work items while drafting specifications or attending LDS. The problem is exacerbated further because the end of cycle is usually a very strenuous period for engineers.
So my questions/suggestions are:
Do other engineers feel this way?
From people's experience, has the one-month-after-ubuntu schedule provided
concrete advantages? Could we get away with less (e.g. one week)?
- If we don't change anything we should at least make this situation very clear
to engineers/managers, so that they can plan accordingly: ~5 months of normal work, starting two weeks after LDS and ending one week before the next LDS. Keep the rest for planning/LDS and spec-ing, plus some light work.
Thoughts?
Thanks, Alexandros