[Scummvm-devel] Understaffing

[Marcus Comstedt]

Joost Peters <joostp at 7fc1.org> writes:

> Gee, no-one has an opinion on this? :)
>
> Guys, the question is real simple: Do you think this idea has any merit? 
>   If not, why?  And what do you think would help improve the situation?
>
> The lack of responses only confirms the theory that beyond their own 
> corner of ScummVM, most people hardly feel responsible for the other 
> things to do with the project.  Which is why, in my opinion, it would be 
> good to have people with specific responsibilities that you can 
> approach, rather than expecting the leads to do everything (which is 
> what it boils down to right now), and wearing them down in the process.

My 2 öre:  Having well defined responsibilities is good.  Right now we
have the Release Manager which owns the release process, and the
porters which owns their port modules, but we could have others
responsible for other processes, or for specific modules or facets of
the code.

What I think will _not_ work, however, is trying to define a set of
roles, and then go recruiting to fill those roles.  The basis
needs to be what people want to do, not what we would like to
have done, otherwise the role will just feel like a burden, and
the result is unlikely to be good.

But if someone says "I want to be resposible for X", then making that
person responsible for X seems like a good idea.  Being responsible
for X would then mean that he/she can work with X without asking for
anybody elses opinion, and simply get things done.  (Of course, the
project lead would still have the final word in case of a conflict.)


  // Marcus