user discussion & meeting and more meetings

user discussion & meeting and more meetings

[Andrew Cagney]

lets throw this open for debate;

On Wednesday's @9:30 CA-EST is a discussion about UI aspects of frysk.  
The discussion ranges from utilities through to the gnome components.  
The discussion has the following goals:
-> focus on end user experience
-> be focused - very limited topic list, shorter meeting
-> have clear outcomes, and follow them through
-> occasionally, the opportunity to explore new ideas
At the moment I'm picking things driven largely by active work that I'm 
aware of.  Going forward, I hope this will evolve into more of a weekly 
show-n-tell - an opportunity to highlight progress and gain quick 
feedback on new work.  The discussion is proving to be largely 
non-technical.

Elena is asking that there also be made available time where non user 
issues can be addressed:
-> a free technical exchange
-> co-operative planning and administration
(At present there's an internal meeting that touches on this).

There are several ideas to kick around:
-> expand Wednesday morning's meeting to include other matters
-> add a second weekly meeting
-> Cycle the Wednesday meeting so that it alternates between user / 
technical / co-op focused
-> have less regular technical/co-op focused meetings
-> use mailing lists and irc for technical stuff
-> ...

I've two personal and strong preferences:
-> not have too many meetings
-> keep discussion focused, for instance, as been done with UI discussion

Comments and suggestions.

Andrew

Re: user discussion & meeting and more meetings

[Rick Moseley]

Andrew Cagney wrote:
> lets throw this open for debate;
>
> On Wednesday's @9:30 CA-EST is a discussion about UI aspects of 
> frysk.  The discussion ranges from utilities through to the gnome 
> components.  The discussion has the following goals:
> -> focus on end user experience
> -> be focused - very limited topic list, shorter meeting
> -> have clear outcomes, and follow them through
> -> occasionally, the opportunity to explore new ideas
> At the moment I'm picking things driven largely by active work that 
> I'm aware of.  Going forward, I hope this will evolve into more of a 
> weekly show-n-tell - an opportunity to highlight progress and gain 
> quick feedback on new work.  The discussion is proving to be largely 
> non-technical.
>
> Elena is asking that there also be made available time where non user 
> issues can be addressed:
> -> a free technical exchange
> -> co-operative planning and administration
> (At present there's an internal meeting that touches on this).
>
> There are several ideas to kick around:
> -> expand Wednesday morning's meeting to include other matters
> -> add a second weekly meeting
> -> Cycle the Wednesday meeting so that it alternates between user / 
> technical / co-op focused
I vote for this.  Having weekly UI stuff does not allow time to 
necessarily implement changes.  Maybe it was good here at the first 
because the UI had not been reviewed in a while, but now that it has 
moving to a less-than-weekly review would be best, IMHO.
> -> have less regular technical/co-op focused meetings
> -> use mailing lists and irc for technical stuff
> -> ...
>
> I've two personal and strong preferences:
> -> not have too many meetings
> -> keep discussion focused, for instance, as been done with UI discussion
>
> Comments and suggestions.
>
> Andrew
>

Re: user discussion & meeting and more meetings

[Phil Muldoon]

Andrew Cagney wrote:
>
> There are several ideas to kick around:
> -> expand Wednesday morning's meeting to include other matters
> -> add a second weekly meeting
> -> Cycle the Wednesday meeting so that it alternates between user / 
> technical / co-op focused
> -> have less regular technical/co-op focused meetings
> -> use mailing lists and irc for technical stuff
> -> ...
>
> I've two personal and strong preferences:
> -> not have too many meetings
> -> keep discussion focused, for instance, as been done with UI discussion
>
> Comments and suggestions.

Personally I find short meetings more productive than longer ones. So 
two 30 minute meetings, for me, are always invariably more productive 
that one hour long plus. This is especially true when the meetings 
require close following of both the speech on the phone, as well as 
following prompts on the vnc session.

That being said, I personally think the weekly UI meetings are just 
going to run into each other, as the deliverable from one meeting to the 
other take more than one week to complete.

My own personal preference would be cycle the Wednesday meeting, 
accordingly.

Regards

Phil
>
> Andrew
>

Re: user discussion & meeting and more meetings

[Stan Cox]

On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 12:05 -0500, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> -> Cycle the Wednesday meeting so that it alternates between user / 
> technical / co-op focused 

I vote for cycling the meetings, with week 1 for
planning/administration/idea exchange and week 2 for technical
discussion.

Re: user discussion & meeting and more meetings

[Mark Wielaard]

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On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 12:05 -0500, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> lets throw this open for debate;
>
> There are several ideas to kick around:
> -> expand Wednesday morning's meeting to include other matters
> -> add a second weekly meeting
> -> Cycle the Wednesday meeting so that it alternates between user / 
> technical / co-op focused
> -> have less regular technical/co-op focused meetings
> -> use mailing lists and irc for technical stuff
> -> ...

I like to see stuff pushed to the mailinglist as much as possible since
that means there is an automatic record and you can read/respond on your
own time.

The ui meetings are useful to explicitly focus on actual usage. But it
looks like doing that once a week is too much for all the feedback it
generates. It seems to take more than a week to actually change the code
based on all the feedback. So doing the ui reviews bi-weekly seems
better.

If we do want to have a phone meeting to sync technical,
who-works-on-what status reports than it seems a good idea to alternate
those on a weekly basis with a ui-review meeting to keep the meetings
short and focused. I kind of tune out after 30/60 minutes on the
phone...

Cheers,

Mark

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Re: user discussion & meeting and more meetings

[Nurdin Premji]

Andrew Cagney wrote:
> lets throw this open for debate;
>
> On Wednesday's @9:30 CA-EST is a discussion about UI aspects of 
> frysk.  The discussion ranges from utilities through to the gnome 
> components.  The discussion has the following goals:
> -> focus on end user experience
> -> be focused - very limited topic list, shorter meeting
> -> have clear outcomes, and follow them through
> -> occasionally, the opportunity to explore new ideas
> At the moment I'm picking things driven largely by active work that 
> I'm aware of.  Going forward, I hope this will evolve into more of a 
> weekly show-n-tell - an opportunity to highlight progress and gain 
> quick feedback on new work.  The discussion is proving to be largely 
> non-technical.
>
> Elena is asking that there also be made available time where non user 
> issues can be addressed:
> -> a free technical exchange
> -> co-operative planning and administration
> (At present there's an internal meeting that touches on this).
>
> There are several ideas to kick around:
> -> expand Wednesday morning's meeting to include other matters
> -> add a second weekly meeting
> -> Cycle the Wednesday meeting so that it alternates between user / 
> technical / co-op focused
> -> have less regular technical/co-op focused meetings
> -> use mailing lists and irc for technical stuff
> -> ...
>
> I've two personal and strong preferences:
> -> not have too many meetings
> -> keep discussion focused, for instance, as been done with UI discussion
>
> Comments and suggestions.
>
> Andrew
>
I lean towards cycling through useability/technical meetings.

Re: user discussion & meeting and more meetings

[Elena Zannoni]

Stan Cox wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 12:05 -0500, Andrew Cagney wrote:
>   
>> -> Cycle the Wednesday meeting so that it alternates between user / 
>> technical / co-op focused 
>>     
>
> I vote for cycling the meetings, with week 1 for
> planning/administration/idea exchange and week 2 for technical
> discussion.
>
>
>
>   

A project management meeting every 2 weeks is not going to cut it 
unfortunately,
given the scope and the size of the project it needs to be done every week.
Doing UI every 2 weeks is reasonable.

Re: user discussion & meeting and more meetings

[Andrew Cagney]

Can you be more specific as to why you consider weekly planning meetings 
to be necessary, or more necessary than giving developers an opportunity 
to get direct feed back on their work.

The discussion has really focused so far more on UI with:

- making requested changes in response to a meeting is >1 week work; 
weekly review of a specific component isn't reasonable
- people max out of a topics discussion (including UI review) at about 
30-60 minutes; so limit the amount of material handled is important
- UI review has very positive effects - developers get to experience 
first hand users succeeding or struggling with what they have implemented

To me this suggests, w.r.t. UI, short sharp weekly reviews focued on a 
single topic may work better:

- possible to run two or more items in parallel - one updated each week
- avoids any delays in getting something onto the agenda
- again gives developers that direct positive feedback that leads to 
better code

Perhaps the time can be split evenly?

Andrew


Elena Zannoni wrote:
> Stan Cox wrote:
>> On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 12:05 -0500, Andrew Cagney wrote:
>>  
>>> -> Cycle the Wednesday meeting so that it alternates between user / 
>>> technical / co-op focused     
>>
>> I vote for cycling the meetings, with week 1 for
>> planning/administration/idea exchange and week 2 for technical
>> discussion.
>>
>>
>>
>>   
>
> A project management meeting every 2 weeks is not going to cut it 
> unfortunately,
> given the scope and the size of the project it needs to be done every 
> week.
> Doing UI every 2 weeks is reasonable.
>

Re: user discussion & meeting and more meetings

[Kris Van Hees]

To chime in on this a bit...   One of the difficult points with frysk
development (from my side) right now is that there is very limited
visibility into the progress of frysk aside from the UI.  These is also
not really information I have been able to find on the side of project
management, in terms of what is being worked on, what the milestones
are, where priorities ought to be, etc...  Truly, basic project
management and knowing who is doing what.  It's kind of important to be
able to share that information, and also to be able to participate in
the decisions that lead up to it.

	Kris

On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 05:48:45PM -0500, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> Can you be more specific as to why you consider weekly planning meetings 
> to be necessary, or more necessary than giving developers an opportunity 
> to get direct feed back on their work.
> 
> The discussion has really focused so far more on UI with:
> 
> - making requested changes in response to a meeting is >1 week work; 
> weekly review of a specific component isn't reasonable
> - people max out of a topics discussion (including UI review) at about 
> 30-60 minutes; so limit the amount of material handled is important
> - UI review has very positive effects - developers get to experience 
> first hand users succeeding or struggling with what they have implemented
> 
> To me this suggests, w.r.t. UI, short sharp weekly reviews focued on a 
> single topic may work better:
> 
> - possible to run two or more items in parallel - one updated each week
> - avoids any delays in getting something onto the agenda
> - again gives developers that direct positive feedback that leads to 
> better code
> 
> Perhaps the time can be split evenly?
> 
> Andrew

Re: user discussion & meeting and more meetings

[Elena Zannoni]

The collective response is that UI meetings are fine every two weeks,
this coming from the engineers themselves, those who would get the feedback.
If they are happy with that, I am happy with that.
You prefer to have the UI meetings every week. I am OK with having 2
meetings every week, one for UI and one for general progress tracking of
the overall project and its dependencies.  I am a bit skeptical that 
we'll be
disciplined enough to keep it to 2 45 minutes sessions. But let's try, 
if people
are ok with this as well.

Reason for having the project management type meetings is that we need more
outside visibility about the project priorities/milestones and also 
because it's
important to see what people are up to in their tasks, and possible 
points of
overlap and interactions. 

To find out where Oracle can really contribute w/o stepping on anybody's 
toes
and work on something that is important for the advancement of frysk
we need to coordinate.