Project Snowstorm

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Revision as of 04:11, 16 March 2011 by Oz Linden (talk | contribs) (added Beta Candidate)
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Snowstorm-icon.png
Snowstorm is the name of the team responsible for coordinating development and integration of the Second Life Viewer, and for engaging the open source development community in its evolution. The Snowstorm team and Project Snowstorm started in August, 2010.


Mission & Goals

To improve the performance, reliability, and ease of use of the Second Life Viewer, while enabling the rapid, effective deployment of new Viewer features and functionality to the Second Life Resident population.

Evaluate & Prioritize work by asking:

Does it make Second Life faster, easier, and more fun?

Work in the open:

  • Share work processes, branches, and backlog.
  • Demonstrate rapid responsiveness to feedback and contributions from the open source community
  • Provide daily builds from the Development (integration) repository

Improve user experience:

  • Clean up broken glass
  • Fix Viewer bugs
  • Import improvements from open source contributors
  • Add small features that have high value/low cost

Team

  • Oz Linden - Open Source Lead
  • Merov Linden
  • Grumpity ProductEngine and three contract engineers.
  • Open Source Contributors

Testing

The following is links to the most recent builds from the main viewer-development integration repository:

Latest Development Viewers:
Windows | Macintosh | Linux
Details for these builds (build logs, included changesets)


and the viewer that we expect to be the next beta:

2.6.0 Beta Candidate
in testing now - candidate for release on the Beta channel March 17
Windows | Macintosh | Linux

Source: viewer-pre-beta
Details for these builds (build logs, included changesets)



and we also frequently publish test builds for things that have not yet been integrated.

Processes

Snowstorm uses a modified scrum process.

We maintain a list of all the work we'd like to be doing, called the Product Backlog; it is a public living document, and new proposals may be added to it at any time:

Work is organized into two week sprints. At the beginning of each sprint, we choose items to work on from the product backlog to construct the sprint backlog, the list of tasks we are committing to complete in the sprint. Once defined, we do not normally change this list during the sprint. We track progress daily at the Snowstorm Team Standup - a short (target: 15 minutes) meeting in which contributors who have committed to deliverables in the sprint report on daily progress, goals, and impediments:

In addition to its own development tasks, the Snowstorm team is responsible for integration of all contributions to the Viewer from other Linden Lab development teams and from open source.

KBnote.png Note: Changes that introduce new Viewer features may not be submitted for integration without having been reviewed and accepted into the product backlog. Changes to fix a bug that the triage process has Accepted may be submitted at any time so long as all integration criteria have been met.

Questions & Answers

Who gets commit access?
Commit access by open source contributors is not available to any Linden Lab repository, including viewer-development.
Individual development teams, whether inside or outside Linden Lab, decide who has commit access to their Project branches.
For the Development branch, the Snowstorm Team has a JIRA-based queue for requests for integration (pull requests) from Project branches that have met the integration criteria. The Snowstorm team commits to servicing the items in that queue within 1 business day.
Which issue tracker are we using?
We use the public Jira. New issues should be created in the VWR project, and we'll move appropriate open issues from there and Linden Lab internal projects (these will become part of the Snowstorm Team backlog) to the public STORM process.
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