Re: Status reports - why not regularly?

On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Matteo Riondato wrote:

> I'm sorry but I cannot understand your point (this can be my poor
> english fault..).  I'm talking about writing a Report, not about Vinum
> or in general software development.  If neither of us two can understand
> what each commit means, we cannot write a report about the status of the
> project and we have to ask a developer to explain what he did.  After
> that we could write our report. 

The reason I selected the model I did for status reports was that it
attempted to take into account that our commit message flow is very
technical and hard to follow for end users, and that our developers know
the most about where things have been and where they are going.  The
problem with this model is it requires us to poll the developers, and this
works fairly well but is time consuming.  I got caught up in release
engineering and then a lot of other stuff, and then Scott got caught up in
release engineering in a big way, and so the status reports lagged as a
result.  I'd like to get them going again, however, as I think they are
very important -- not just for end users, but also so developers see "the
big picture".  In a large project, it sometimes feels you're amid chaos
and lack of direction, but really what it takes is someone picking and
choosing what to present in order to make things clear :-).

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert_at_fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research