Announcing Launchpad Squads

[Francis J. Lacoste]

We've made some changes to how we organise the Launchpad team!

We're no longer divided into application-based teams (Bugs, Code,
Foundations, Registry, Soyuz and Translations). Instead, we now have five
cross-domain engineering squads: three focused on features and two on
maintenance.


How does this affect you?
--------------------------

When you want to speak to someone about a specific part of Launchpad,
whether for help, to escalate something or about an operational issue,
things have changed a little.

Specifically:

* For help and any other operational issues related to Launchpad, you should
 either send an email to the launchpad-users mailing list[1], or file a
 question on the Launchpad project[2]. (Reminder: these forums are public.)

* If your request would benefit from interactive discussions, drop by in
 #launchpad on Freenode where one of the people working on the maintenance
 squads will be able to help you. If your request isn't suitable for public
 consumption, you can reach the same people on the #launchpad-ops channel on
 the private Canonical IRC server.

* To prioritize feature requests and to escalate other bugs, you should
 contact our product strategist[3]. The Ubuntu Technical Board is in the 
 process of finding someone to represent the Ubuntu project on the 
 stakeholders group that helps the product strategist establish priorities[4].
* You can also always bounce ideas to the developers list [5].

[1] https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-users
[2] https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+addquestion
[3] https://launchpad.net/~jml
[4] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2010-
November/000571.html
[5] https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev

Short-term, we also expect some churn as people are exposed to areas they
weren't used to before. But down-the-line, we'll have much more distributed
knowledge coverage across the whole application.


How the squads work
-------------------

The squads will alternate between "development project" and "maintenance"
modes.

The three development squads will work on longer term projects, usually
resulting in new functionality. Once such a squad has finished a project
they'll swap places with one of the two maintenance squads.

Bugs, operational issues and so on will be taken care of by the maintenance
squads. 

Deciding which development projects to take on will remain the responsibility 
of our strategist (Jonathan Lange) in collaboration with the Launchpad 
Stakeholders group.

You can find a list of who is in each squad on our dev wiki [5].

[5] https://dev.launchpad.net/Squads


Why are we doing this?
----------------------

Our app-based teams served us well, but were becoming a liability:

* Many parts of Launchapd, such as Blueprint, didn't have a dedicated team
  and were basically unmaintained.

* Each team was responsible for both new features within their app as well
  as maintenance. That slowed both of these.

* Projects that required cross-app integration suffered from hand-off and
  coordination problem.

With this new structure, we expect to see:

* Better cohesion across the application, as one squad will be responsible
  for the implementation of new aspects across the whole application.

* Reduced cycle-time both for bug fixes and for new features as the
  context-switching will be removed.

It will be my pleasure to answer any questions you might have regarding
this reorg.

-- 
Francis J. Lacoste
francis.lacoste at canonical.com
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