[sldev] Linden's new Sustaining Engineering group

[Kent Quirk (Q Linden)]

Hi, everyone.

This message is just a little announcement about a change we've made  
at Linden Lab recently (about a month ago now) -- we've created a  
group of people whose job is explicitly to focus on what's known as  
"Sustaining Engineering" for the viewer. Basically, that's doing the  
maintenance to keep the heat on and the roof from leaking.

I'm the manager of the Sustaining Engineering group, and on the team  
are some people you've seen on this list -- Soft, Tofu, and Coco.

In particular, our charter is:

* Handling viewer bugs. This is defined partly by what it's not --  
namely, it's not architecture, and it's not anything that requires  
significant refactoring or changes the user interface in significant  
ways. But it is annoyances and UI glitches as well as programming  
errors.

* Handling "featurettes". These are the small features that make  
people's lives easier or fix UI inconsistencies. Recent examples  
included moving some menu items, enabling and disabling buttons at key  
times, and the feature that allows dropping inventory directly onto an  
IM window.

* Handling open source patches. Yes! We now have people at LL whose  
job is, explicitly, importing patches and getting them into the  
release. We've been trying, in recent weeks, to be very responsive to  
patches submitted, and explicit about what we're doing with them. It  
doesn't mean we'll take every patch thrown at us, but I hope that when  
we don't take them, we'll be able to give better guidance as to why.

What you should see from us in the next few weeks/months:

* An increased attention to patch submissions in the PJIRA. We do a  
weekly internal triage of issues in PJIRA, and our priority is to  
first consider issues with patches, then new issues, and finally to  
revisit issues that have already been considered but need additional  
action or are getting old. As I said above, our goal is to respond to  
all patches rather than letting them languish, even if the response is  
"we can't take this".

* Aggregation of PJIRA issues into related topics. You saw this  
earlier this week with Rob's post on patch bundling for Chat/IM  
messages, but we hope to do a lot more of that, and to enlist this  
community in tackling collections of related issues in a timely fashion.

* An improvement with respect to reflecting accurate status in PJIRA.  
A common phrase in our triage now is "will you please update the PJIRA?"

* A gradual improvement in patch throughput from submission through to  
release or at least visible builds. This is a general Linden Lab issue  
-- our release process is long right now -- but the Sustaining group  
can help by aggregating issues through release in a timely fashion. We  
can also try to publish branches as early as possible in our  
development process.


I'm very excited about this new group. I will continue to show up at  
the weekly open source meetings, at my own office hour, and I will try  
to come to the public triage meetings when I can. I also read this  
list and from time to time log in on the #opensl IRC channel. In  
short, I'm pretty easy to find -- please come talk to me.

     Q