Re: Google Summer of Code 2013 (GSoC13)

Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes:

A few words about my experience, not with GSoC, but with school projects (I've been proposing a few students in Ensimag to contribute to Git each year since 2010).

Last year, we've been using Scrum, and the "definition of done" was a very helpful tool. In Scrum, nothing is ever "half done", it is either "done" or "not done". Out of a 3 weeks project, the definition of done was initially "ready to be sent to the list", then "sent to the list, no major criticism in reviews" the second week, and "sent to the list, no more objections in reviews" the last week. At the beginning of each week ("sprint" in Scrum), students were commiting to a list of tasks, and at the end of each week, we evaluated how many were done. This encouraged students to avoid overcommiting and send patches early. Some of them validated nothing at all the first week: they hadn't realized the distance between their notion of clean working code and the one on this list, but at least they realized it early enough.

Of course, even with that, I had to continue the work to push it to master for some patch series, and discard some series that were basically not there.

Having several small projects instead of one big was very important. I'm not sure how the GSoC would feel about a list of small tasks instead of one ambitious project however.

My main disappointment is that I never managed to keep students in the community past the end of the project.