[technology-pmc] [Fwd: OSEE initial observations]

[Wayne Beaton <wayne@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello OSEE committers. Over the past week or so, I have been doing a 
review of the project. This is not a formal review as described by the 
Eclipse development process, but more of an informal review to see what 
the PMC can do to help you grow your community and eventually take over 
the world.

My view is that OSEE is doing a fair job of community development, 
especially considering the relative youth of the project. I'd like to 
see a little more outreach. Probably one of the easiest things that you 
can do to develop community is to regularly monitor your newsgroup and 
mailing lists to make sure that questions get answered. Given that the 
project is still new and that the current community is small, you cannot 
afford to lose even one potential user/contributor. Getting involved in 
domain-specific forums, blogging, and speaking at conferences are other 
activities that go a long way toward increasing knowledge of your 
project and finding others to contribute. A relatively small about of 
investment now should pay dividends later.

It seems as though the project committers are trying to work open and 
transparently. At present, however, it appears as though all planning is 
done in private and then communicated via bugzilla entries and an 
occasional message on the dev list. It'd be nice to see more discussion 
around planning occur in the open. Conference calls should be open to 
the public. Meeting minutes should be posted. Planning can also be done 
via the mailing lists; give others a chance to weigh in with their 
opinions before decisions are made. Early on in a project, you'll 
probably find that outside activity will be very small, but give an 
opportunity for the community to interact directly anyway. If you build 
it, they will come.

Growing a community is a vital ingredient for an open source project. 
Some of the most successful projects spend a great deal of their time 
working on community development (some committers spend as much as 25% 
of their time).

Here are some other observations/questions:

I hate to be a bear about this sort of thing, but the 0.4.0 "release" 
has to be taken down. Without a release review, there can be no release. 
I suggest that you schedule a short call with your mentors to discuss 
reviews.

There is little on the project web page to encourage contribution. It'd 
be good to see a page that describes how somebody who wants to help out 
can get the code from SVN, configure their workspace, ask questions, etc.

Does the project self-host? The website states that "The system captures 
project data into a common user-defined data model providing 
bidirectional traceability, project health reporting, status, and 
metrics which seamlessly combine to form a coherent, accurate view of a 
project in real-time." Is OSEE providing these services for itself? The 
FAQ seems to indicate that it does. Is this something that I can see for 
myself?

I noticed that the org.eclipse.osee.framework.core bundle doesn't 
contain an about.html file. For more information, see [2].

Does the project have regular calls? Is the community invited? Are the 
meeting minutes posted anywhere? If you're asking questions and making 
decisions, these questions and decisions need to be posed and posted for 
maximum transparency.

The mailing list, osee-dev [3], is virtually unused. The newsgroup [4] 
has more activity, but I have some concern that user's aren't getting 
the feedback they require. One entry states how the lack of feedback is 
hurting the chances of OSEE adoption for at least one organization [5]:

>  I just want to give some feedback - in the last days I have evaluated
>  OSEE for using it by one of our customer. You have a great product
>  with many useful features, but I decide to use our own solution,
>  because of lack of documentation (which I can accept for the new
>  Eclipse project) and because I didn't get any answers on my questions
>  in the news portal. So I don't have a good feeling, that I can
>  customize OSEE to the customer's needs and can get support from the
>  project committers.
>
>  You have to invest more time in community support - that is very
>  important for a new project and helps to set up the communication
>  with (potential) users of the project.

The release schedule is incorrect and needs to be updated. It's showing 
a 0.5.0, and 0.6.0 release (in addition to the 0.4.0) marked as 
"complete". I do not see any release reviews nor are there any downloads 
related to these releases.

There is no project plan. This leads me to believe that the plan is 
private. Having a project plan will make it easier for other groups and 
individuals to contribute to your project.

What technology does osee use for persistence? Is there an opportunity 
to leverage existing technology like EclipseLink here?

All bugs against OSEE, except for one, have been created by project 
committers. In fact, most bugs were created by a single committer.  I 
think it's great that you're using Bugzilla to track work being done on 
the project. This goes a long way in helping others get involved. I 
reviewed a random sample of the bugs, and almost all of them contain no 
more than a single comment or two. This leads me to believe that 
decisions are being made in private and that bugs are created to reflect 
those decisions. It'd be nice to see some discussion occuring in those 
bugs between the current committers and others in the community with 
decisions being made based on the feedback. This is likely just be a 
reflection of the relative youth of the project and should hopefully 
improve with time as the community develops.

Is there an OSEE blog? I'd love to see a blog aggregated on 
planet.eclipse.org and, perhaps, on a domain-specific blog aggregator.

What conferences/events are OSEE committers presenting at?

Are there any articles on OSEE that we can link to from the /resources 
page? Are there any article ideas that might fit well on Eclipse Corner 
(/articles)?

Thanks,

Wayne

[1] 
http://www.eclipse.org/projects/project_summary.php?projectid=technology.osee
[2] http://www.eclipse.org/legal/guidetolegaldoc.php
[3] http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/osee-dev/maillist.html
[4] 
http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.technology.osee
[5] 
http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/article.php?id=139&group=eclipse.technology.osee#139
[6] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Development_Resources/HOWTO/Parallel_IP_Process