agile – blog.fossasia.org

Open Source Developer Guide and Best Practices at FOSSASIA

Post author:Mario Behling
Post published:April 11, 2017
Post category:Community FOSSASIA Open Event
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I would request you to please guide me as to how can I collaborate with you and also how can I contribute effectively to the organization. At times I might get up to 20 private mails per day about "How to contribute to Open Source". Usually I will direct developers to our mailing list or chat channels if they are asking about a specific project. But, how do contributions work at FOSSASIA? How can new developers join projects effectively? We have tried many different ways and spent a lot of time communicating with newcomers, many of them new to Git and Open Source development. Over the years we have gotten better at helping new developers, designers and other contributors to join up. We have more than 1300 registered developers in our GitHub organization today. Not all of them can contribute every day, but we do have thousands of commits every year. So, how are we able to scale up? I believe one reason are our Best Practices. We didn't have a document "FOSSASIA Best Practices" yet, but in our daily work we have established excellent (mostly unwritten) best practices, that I would like to share in a concise form here now as a reference for new developers. Happy to get your feedback and comments. Development Best Practices at FOSSASIA Culture and Communication Please adapt your language to non-native English speakers and be super friendly. Remember we are an international community with contributors mainly from Asia and Europe. We are not used to swearing and will mostly understand words literally. At all times ensure your tone stays appropriate and friendly in the FOSSASIA community. Stay modest. Sometimes newcomers already have an amazing knowledge in some areas. Still remember, it is no reason to be arrogant. Even the best developer does not know everything. Be nice and welcoming. Why not add "please" in an issue or a comment "Thank you" in a pull request if someone did a good job? Show your appreciation for the good work of your co-developers. If you are involved in a topic you don’t understand yet, try to learn yourself as much as possible from public channels (wikipedia, stackoverflow) but also do not hesitate to ask questions to other developers. Communication Channels Every project at FOSSASIA has its own channels. Many projects use Gitter, some Slack or IRC. Usually you will find information of the main communication channels of a project in the Readme.md. While we are a community of Open Source and Free Software developers we still reserve our right to use whatever tools we deem necessary to help us to achieve our goal of developing the best possible Open Technologies - software and hardware. It is one step at a time :-) Private and Public Chat or Issue Tracker Chat is a great way to connect with other contributors, but not all contributors are there all the time (consider time difference and personal schedules) and they are not always available to chat. Chat tends to be unstructured and with lots of people in a room there are often a number of…

How do we work? Agile

Post author:rafalkowalski
Post published:June 24, 2016
Post category:Event Management Open Event
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It's not typical team. We don't meet face-to-face each other on daily basis, one trouble is that we have to work from different time zones, and we have different operating system, the way of working, or even culture. But we are FOSSASIA Open Event team of six amazing developers so it does not discourage us to achieve our goals. But even if we experience all these things we have to learn how to work together successfully. We are trying, and I think it is becoming better and better every day, the Agile methodology. So first of all, before coding started, we had prepared user stories in issues. Every issue had been very well documented, and we had divided each issue to smaller ones. It brings us a lot of benefits, because it doesn't matter where you work. If sub issue is empty you can take it. Due to the fact that issue is very well documented you don't need to even ask someone what to do. This case saves a lot of time. I know that writing clear issues is very boring and It could seemed not to be beneficial, but it's. We are still trying to improve our performance and we are looking for new opportunities where and how we can improve our work, without lost quality of our development process. Then, we have one week sprint (milestones). It helps us to control our work and we know where are we, what have we done, and what is still to do. We know if our speed is enough or we have to move faster. And it also enables us to see our progress. Moreover, we have daily scrums. We answer three following questions - what did you do yesterday, what do you plan to do today and what is preventing you from achieving your goals. Furthermore, we follow continues integration system. We push code to our common Open Event repository on daily basis. It helps us to control our code and fix bugs quickly. I am sure we will continue along this path, and successfully finish to code an amazing Open Event web app.