Re: On management

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 03:28:50PM +0100, Turbo Fredriksson wrote:
> Quoting Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>:
> 
> > As of now, I see it as a failure of the project. But this is also
> > nothing that can't be fixed. What do you people think could be done to
> > bring the skills we are lacking to the project, with its current
> > structure?
> 
> Since I agree (well, more than agree - I think it's absolutly vital :),
> how about actually PAYING them? Get one or two professionals and pay
> them (halftime perhaps)...
> 
> I have no idea how the economy looks, but would there be room for
> such a thing?

A third party organization, dunc-tank, which included a number of
prominent Debian Developers, including AJ, did pay for two of the
release managers to work full-time for approximately a month at a
time, at the end of 2006.  This was actually highly contentious with
some claiming that it delayed the release because it "demotivated
them".  I know of now hard evidence to prove that the net result was
negative, and certainly during the period when the two release
managers were paid, the RC bug count did decline quite significantly,
and you can see a significant difference in the slope and sign of the
derivitive of the RC bug count before and after that period where two
of the RM's were paid.  

Certainly the fact that we did pay them did cause a huge amount of
flaming on various debian mailing lists, which perhaps might have
delayed the release, but my personal opinion is that DD's being DD's,
there would have found some other topic to flame about, whether it was
license issues, or whether to expel a particular DD, or something
else....  So I believe the paying RM's was a net positive, and there
are those who would disagree with me.  (And to be fair, I need to
disclose that I was one of the people who helped to organize
dunc-tank.)

The harder problem, though is that finding a really good project
manager.  In my day job, I can tell you have as a technical architect,
having a great project manager is like pure gold.  My project manager
defers to me on technical issues, but helps to coordinate all of the
other technical teams so that we can make all of the schedules line up
and release a coherent solution to the customer.  Not to denigrate the
efforts of the current release management team, but if we were to
augment (NOT replace!) them with a good project manager, we could make
them be far more effective.

						- Ted