On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 05:45:49AM -0400, Philippe Cloutier wrote:
> Lucas writes about "that broken" team, you write about teams which "had
> breakages" and "had fairly major issues". If there are really 8 teams
> which were at one point "that broken", I suppose your proposition is
> interesting. Would you estimate that all of the teams you mentioned are
> or were at some point broken to the point of being unable to accept good
> candidates or justify rejection of bad candidates?
>
> I am curious to know more about these teams... from the teams that
> recovered, what was the problem in these teams? How were they fixed
> (internally/externally?)?
It's the sysadmins who are usually cited as the most lagged. They still have
just four members (and have had only two changes in the last decade, AFAIR),
they are all generally haphazardly active, and they had no issue tracking
system for years, instead people used to send mails to their list which went
unanswered for months or years or never, even if issues were fairly trivial.
This, coupled with the fact that many if not most people in Debian are
qualified for the job, has made people bitter.
There were also major problems with account managers, ftpmaint and
keyring-maint, their incoming request queues tended to get very much
lagged (several weeks or months).
Others have generally coped better, but I know from personal experience,
sometimes as team member, sometimes as someone trying to get a team to do
something, sometimes as a team member who contributed to the decay :) that
all other teams that I mentioned have had periods where people couldn't get
stuff done because nobody from the team was tending to incoming requests, or
at least not tending to them properly.
Sometimes problems had more to do with there being too few people to just
answer incoming e-mails, rather than the group being actually unable to get
their main work done. It should also be noted that this can be a matter of
people missing mails because of huge amounts of spam, or other junk, such as
completely clueless requests that essentially waste people's time.
Sometimes team organization problems escalate, sometimes they don't.
Obviously there are also team problems which aren't related so much to
organization, but to the quality of work, or lack of new quality being
added. It's when both quality and organization suffer, it's more likely
that problems will escalate.
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