[Bf-committers] BF coordination meeting notes - 2019.08.12

[Dalai Felinto]

Hi all,

Here are the notes from our private weekly meeting about the Blender
coordination work. If anyone has any point that would like us to
discuss, please let me know via email or #blender-chat.

Participants: Brecht Van Lommel, Dalai Felinto, Nathan Letwory
August 12th, 2019

Quick topics overview
=================
* Weekly availability
* Bi-weekly video communication
* Design decisions
* Code review
* Weekly notes
* Release cycle and dates proposal
* Bug report wizard
* Infrastructure priorities

Weekly availability
==============
* Spreadsheet map with all BF/BI developers work hours
* Need to check if developers mind this information made public

Bi-weekly video communication
========================
* Bi-weekly video chats with a manager + 2 "random" developers
* Idea approved within the group, developers are free to opt-out though

Design decisions
=============
* Design changes should go through code-review as any other change in Blender
* We need a better system to have changes tested
* Discussion derailed a bit into buildbot and infrastructure
* From process point of view we need to be sure the module teams are
involved once we apply the big picture views into the specific
projects

Code review
==========
* At the moment we need 1 developer to approve a new patch
* One of the ideas presented (gathered from other developers) was to
have 1 junior and 1 senior developer assigned to each patch.
* Proposal to address this will come

Weekly developer notes
===================
* Mission is to find a way to make the weekly reports more useful
* Bot proposal - questions asked on blender.chat by a bot by the end of the week
  - How was your work week? Any difficulties, …? Plans?
  - Information would be concatenated.
* Current wiki reports have few purposes:
  - Show dev-fund supporters their money is being used well
  - Managers to assess if everyone is on track or need assistance
  - Developers to wrap up for the week, and plan ahead
* Should avoid "bureaucracy" at all costs, weekly reports should be done once

Release cycle and dates proposal
==========================
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:JesterKing/ReleaseCycleNotes
* Sep-13th - Cut out for new big features
* Oct-1st - Create stabilizing branch and start tagging bugs to 2.81
* Nov-14th - Plan for final release

Bug report wizard
==============
* Find a balance between users using Help > Report a bug from Blender,
and have them filling all the required information
* Proposal is to have a wizard-like report system where users only
type one information at a time

Infrastructure priorities
=================
* We have many infrastructure topics, we need to prioritize them
* Some of them are already in developer.blender.org,
* Discussion derailed into a specific issue (build-bots) which has the
highest priority

Follows-ups
=========
* Present bi-weekly communication proposal and schedule meetings [Dalai]
* Ask developers if they mind sharing work timetables online [Dalai]
* Meeting with design team to assess their current workflow with the
other modules [Dalai]
* Code review proposal for new commits down the line [Nathan]
* Weekly reports bot [Nathan]
* Release proposal dates - email prior to next bf-committers developer
meeting [Nathan]
* Bug report wizard playboard to be sent to Nathan [Brecht]
* Move the infrastructure topics (new bug report, weekly notes bot, …)
to developer.blender.org [Nathan]

Regards,
Dalai