Project Snowstorm

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

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:

Fix Viewer bugs
Import improvements from open source contributors
Add small features that have high value/low cost

Team

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

Communications

Email list: opensource-dev (archive)
IRC: #opensl on freenode
Calendar (ical)
Daily Scrum: M-F 10:30am-10:45am PDT at Scrum Platform
Other regularly scheduled meetings
Viewer Development Source Repository
Code Review Tool and documentation on how to use it
In-Code (doxygen) Documentation:
- on dimentox.com updated nightly from main viewer-development repo.
Technology Blog

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:

Product Backlog.
- How To Propose A Viewer Feature

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:

Sprint Backlog
- Daily scrum is 10:30am-10:45am PDT at Scrum Platform
  Note: the daily scrum is public, but only attendees who have committed to deliverables in the sprint are allowed to speak or add to chat during the meeting.
- Daily Scrum Archive
- Sprint Retrospective Archive

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.

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.