[Scummvm-devel] Leadership. Open position(s)

Eugene Sandulenko sev at scummvm.org
Wed Jun 22 21:59:49 CEST 2011


Hi Team again,

Seeing some suggestions (thanks for them), but so far no volunteers
;), I see a need to put some clarifications to the topic.

It seems to me that many people do not really know what does it mean
to be a ScummVM Team co-leader. Below is an outlook of the
responsibilities roughly in order of their importance.

Before I start, let me add more thoughts on the plate, which justify
this order. ScummVM is a widely known and huge open source project. We
have 60+ active contributors (I count porters too) and over 1.2
millions lines of code. There is no single developer leading the
/development/ (although Max was pushing OSystem API footprint, and I
was giving some advice in terms of release management), rather we have
number of engine subteams, each of which serves as a sandbox for 1-6
developers, working closely together. But being a big team, even by
corporate standards, there are always people issues, and that is
exactly where the leads are needed for.

What a leader is involved in:
(a) Publicity. We were the primarily point of contact for journalists,
bloggers and companies.
(b) Legal issues. There was number of them, and there are several
source code negotiations going on even now.
(c) People issues. There is often need to talk to individual
developers and settle down the conflicts.
(c1) Judging in case of disputes. Leaders have veto.
(d) Motivating people. Sometimes there is work to be done, say before
the release. The best approach is to take the lead in the coding.
(d1) Coaching new developers.
(e) Maintaining the focus. ScummVM is collection of highly portable
game engines for 2d point and click adventures.
(f) Maintaining the project funds. We have donations, money from
Google, and we have number of expenses

As you see, I do not talk much about the code above. That falls under
(e), and is just one and not primary responsibility, Again, today it
is not possible for a lead to stick nose into every aspect of
development. Max was superb with it, and unfortunately we got some of
those skills degraded within the team. Nevertheless, there are several
code-related activities where leads are involved:
(1) Leading the development, often that means doing a dirty work
(2) Watching portability issues
(3) Guarding OSystem from pollution
(4) Looking for overall code structure, suggesting improvements

I hope this helps to draw the correct picture.


Eugene




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