Release wranglers call today (Wednesday) -- 6.8 postpartum discussion

[Danny Backx]

I don't want to spend $$ of my own money to track the call
so I'll reply by mail.

I can't judge the stress this release put on you all, but I assume
it was significant, so you sure deserve congratulations on this
release.

There's one thing I find lacking in Kevins report though; and I'm
now relating to my own professional situation. We assemble project
teams that are almost always a set of people of different disciplines.

A project with a lot of coordination, or with a difficult customer,
always gets staff that has communication skills. Testing gets done
by people who don't know the first thing about programming but who
are trained to test functional requirements, and to document their
findings in a structured way.

I could go on.

The part of this that I feel missing in the X.org release is that
I had the feeling that we had no, or too little, communication/
coordination/... staff. After reading the report to which I am
replying, I realise that there was a release manager and that he
worked very very hard.

But that's the technical release manager, a software engineer of
some sort.

I think we also need a non-technical release manager. Someone who
(almost) doesn't know about software, but whose main task and
skill is to communicate.
This person could oversee that the process which is now documented
in the report gets documented in advance; that people who ask questions
about how to participate get answers (and check whether the answer
actually answers the question that got asked), ... that people get
nagged if they promise to test something but don't deliver, ...

Apologies if I'm ranting or if I'm writing things that are obvious to
all, but my name is not on the release status sheet, and my bug
wasn't noticed for a long time, due to a succession of communication
issues. I'm not blaming anyone but I'd like to see this avoided
in the future.

	Danny
-- 
Danny Backx - danny.backx-at-planetinternet.be    http://up.to/danny.backx