Organizing this weekend’s TG2 sprint
Thanks to Jim Baker and lessons learned from the recent Django sprint, I’ve been working on making sure we have a good plan for this weekend’s TG2 sprint. I’ve been working hard to be prepared, because this sprint looks like it will be significantly more complex to manage, when compared to the sprints I’ve organized before.
I’ve been to two sprints that I didn’t run, and have run 4 more. But each of those were all a half dozen people or less, all in one location, and they were focused on a smaller set of issues.
This one is different — there are going to be a lot more people (it looks like more than 30, but it’s hard to know for sure!), and many of those people people will be sprinting remotely from all over the place. And there will be a half dozen simultaneous “in person” sprint gatherings around the world.
It would be very easy for me to become the bottleneck to the process, since I’m the person most familiar with what’s been done, and what still needs to be done.
So, I’m working to make sure that does not happen.
One challenge is that there will be lots of people working on the sprint who have no TG2 experience, and varying degrees of Python experience, so comming up with enough tasks for people every experience and ability level is not easy, but thanks to the great suggestions on the sprint wiki, there’s quite a few of good ideas.
The next organizational hurdle will be organizing who does what tasks, and so we’ve taken all the core TG tasks and put them into Trac. That way there’s no need to have central “task organizer” person. Everybody can take a look at the list of tasks, and can grab something, assign it to themself in Trac, and go.
The third major difficulty is organizing all the code commits, but we’ll try to be pretty free with the commit bit for the tg2sprint branch, and several of us can make it our mission in life to take patches posted to track and commit them right away.
My last big task before the sprint is to create a couple of pages worth of “Getting Started with TG2 development” docs so that there’s a basic overview of where we are at that people can use to get up to speed more quickly. And if there’s any time left, I’ll try to flesh out the sprint tickets with more information for those who are ready to get going.
I’m sure there will be some new things to learn, and some growing pains in the process, but I will try to make sure that I write a follow up post next week with some of the lessons learned. And if you’ve got any pre-sprint advice, feel free to let me know ;)