[General] ops team update: Feb 2007

[Katie Capps Parlante]

I've been out for a few weeks, but am back and nearly caught up. :)

Notes from ops meetings in the last month or so:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/Journal/OperationsGroupMeetingNotes20070130
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/Journal/OperationsGroupMeetingNotes20070209
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/Journal/OperationsGroupMeetingNotes20070220
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/Journal/OperationsGroupMeetingNotes20070227
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/Journal/OperationsGroupMeetingNotes20070306

Highlights:
+ We'll hire a few interns this summer, and participate in Google's 
summer of code again. Philippe will send out more info about the 
internships, but feel free to contact him directly if you are 
interested. (pbossut at osafoundation.org) Ted is coordinating the 
summer of code program for OSAF, contact him for questions about that. 
(twl at osafoundation.org)

+ Initial investigation suggested we won't have problems getting the 
Chandler trademark, so we closed on decisions about brand name, domain 
name, and how we'll structure the website and wiki. High level summary:
    + chandlerproject.org (domain)
    + Chandler Hub (the hosted service)
    + Chandler Server (the server -- the whole Cosmo bundle)
    + Chandler Desktop (the desktop app)
Sheila will send out an update with more details.

+ We had a larger discussion about when to use osafoundation.org vs 
chandlerproject.org. One significant point that came out of that 
discussion was that we don't want to hide or obscure the role of OSAF in 
the project -- OSAF's mission, values, etc. apply to "chandler project". 
This affects decisions about how visible OSAF is on the landing page, 
what domain we use for the wiki, etc.

+ A team of designers is working on the logo (Mimi, Priscilla, and 3 
folks from other organizations in our building: Trevor, Jake and Sean). 
They will present 3 options to the ops team, and Mitch will have the 
final pick. They have been soliciting feedback on the pr list. 
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/Projects/LogoRedesign

+ Jared's putting together a draft of the Terms of Service. He'll send 
it out for public review once the draft is further along.

+ We briefly discussed metrics we should be tracking for the service and 
for OSAF as an organization. Jared is working on a proposal, and will 
send it out when he has something more concrete.

+ We discussed interop goals for Preview -- we wanted to make sure 
CalDAV support (regressions) didn't get lost in the noise. We decided to 
frame the Preview goal as being able to interop with Apple's CalDAV 
products, for the CalDAV and webcal features we support. This means that 
we will test against calendarserver and ical. We'll of course continue 
to log and fix  interop problems with other CalDAV clients and servers, 
but we don't have the resources to validate all and fix all interop bugs 
before Preview.

+ We've slipped the Preview schedule, somewhat significantly. While the 
Cosmo schedule slipped a bit, the big slip is really on the desktop 
side. We cut some features (we're disabling printing and freebusy). We 
also wanted to add a 3 week period where all devs focus primarily on 
performance. We'd like to maintain a realistic schedule so that everyone 
can plan appropriately. We're choosing to slip rather than cut further, 
as we feel we'll lose product integrity with further cuts. Also, 
improving performance is critically important, and we need the whole 
team's attention to make real progress on that. With the extra time, the 
Cosmo team has a better shot at making their stretch goal with the 
dashboard.

+ We don't have a large QA team, and with Preview we have a higher 
quality bar. We agreed to a couple strategies to make sure we have good 
test coverage:
    + Ops team and PPD team will spend time running real test cases, in 
addition to "dogfood" useage
    + More frequent QA sessions, particularly after feature complete 
milestones are hit (increased participation in QA sessions is helpful!)
    + Encourage devs and others to dogfood. Once we're past feature 
complete milestones, devs can also help with more testing.
    + We might ask for more help from chandler-users list, and we'll 
take steps to recruit more people dogfooding/testing (even before Preview).

Cheers,
Katie