Code Sprint Decision / Proposal: Team Structure and Projects

tl;dr: just read the part starting at “Teams” and “Projects” below.

Hey fellow Neos developers,

yesterday, we’ve been having our grand retrospective here at the Neos sprint in Dresden – we’ve taken a long time to collect and discuss positive things, but also open problems and areas where we can improve on.

I’d like to highlight one outcome in particular, concerning teams and projects: To many of us here, it felt that the teams work really well as some kind of “homebase”, somehow like your family which cares for your well-being and healthyness. On the other hand, many of us felt bad that the teams actually did not really do projects (in very many cases); but instead we worked in specific contexts “across teams” on different topics (e.g. Website Relaunch, UI Rewrite) in many cases.

That’s why after some discussions we came to the point where we said, that this could be the structure we could directly embrace.

Thus, the idea is as follows: (hopefully I remember all points correctly; the ones being part of the sprint should just add things if I missed something).

Teams

Teams serve as home-base, family, caring for your well-being and the emotional side of the connection to the project. They also help greatly when onboarding new people, and allow for a good way to get to know what’s happening across the project by talking to other team members; and they are rather stable time-wise. They do not have projects or do work, however.

Projects

Projects are a structure where we’re actually doing the work:

  • each project is dedicated to getting a specific topic done.
  • each project should have a specified ending / measurable goal and a proposed timeframe (e.g. a “good” project would be the “Initial React UI Rewrite”, which ends when the React UI is productively used inside Neos. “Neos UI” would not be a project, because it lacks measurable goals.
  • each project has a “spokesperson” who’s the contact person from the outside and is basically responsible for the project’s progress (ensuring meetings take place, decisions are taken, progress is being made)
  • of course, team members and community members can “hop on / hop off” a project.
  • Suggestion: start with one project, as soon as you manage to work well inside this project, and still have spare time, join the next one. Rather finish one project in half the time than starting two projects and taking double the time for both!

Next Steps (or: why I’m writing all this)

We’ve defined some TODOs on the sprint about the next steps; some people will take about communicating all this on the Neos website; and I personally want to create a list of all projects with all members (+ spokespeople) as a basis for that. I’ll do that in a separate Discuss posting; but I thought some general context would be very helpful for those not being able to attend a sprint :smile:

Actually of course if you feel this is a bad decision don’t hesitate to say so – I hope I/we don’t “overrun” anybody. Please also voice your support otherwise :smiley:

All the best,
Sebastian

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Hey everybody,

now, the posting for the list is live.

All the best,
Sebastian

I agree to your writeup, correct IMHO. I used it to start updating the website. :smile:

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