[Year 12 IPM] Real world virtual team

Wed Nov 29 12:35:18 EST 2006

Mark

Thank you. This is the best bit of information yet. Its real its timely and I assume its accurate.

I'll use this.

Brendyn

Brendyn Hancock
IT Manager
bhancock at nagle.sale.catholic.edu.au
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Nagle College
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Bairnsdale VIC 3875 
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>>> kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au 29/11/2006 11:19 am >>>

"OpenTTD" (http://openttd.org) is an open source reverse-engineered 
version of a much-loved game (Transport Tycoon) that is now 10 years 
old, and had to be rewritten for it to continue running under Windows.

A virtual (volunteer) global team works on its development.  I asked its 
former lead developer a few questions about the virtual team experience.

Maybe some of his observations may be of interest...

---

Sure we can help you out with those questions. Let me start off with
just answering the ones you asked:

>> >> Do you, for example, use instant messaging, email, videoconferencing?

Our main ways of communication are IRC and a mailing list. Where the 
last one
is introduced last year, but this isn't working really well. Mostly
because of the delay between question and answers. So it comes down to
IRC for 95% of the time.

>> >> Do you have team rules about communication e.g. filenaming, file
handling, versioning?  Are the rules written down anywhere?

For file handling and versioning we use SVN (Subversion). We have a
coding style and a set way of how to make commit-messages and stuff at
our wiki (http://wiki.openttd.org/). It has to be said that some
developers refuse to use any of them. More about this later.

>> >> Do you have a dedicated forum for managing the team?

No. As said before, we decided that anything should be open and public,
free for everyone to join. Everyone follows the same set of rules. So
there is no real need to have a forum for managing the team. The
communication between the developers most of the time is plenty anyway.
>From time to time this goes wrong, which results in an explosion of
emotions, but I guess that can't be avoided in any way to use.

>> >> How do you exchange very large files (e.g. CD-sized)?

We don't have such large files. The biggest file OpenTTD related is 15
MB, which is a full debug version of the openttd executable. As most
people have ADSL or faster, this never has been a problem. The few
people still on 56k6 rarely care about such files or have the time to
wait for it.

>> >> What problems arise from working virtually rather than face to face?

The main problem we have, is that you can't penalise anyone or anything.
You can't force someone to do something. As said before, it happens that
some developers do not obey a commit-style or code-style. In the worst
case we can remove the commit-rights, but this only makes people more
p***ed off. Other then telling those persons over and over and over
again, there are no options. This is, in my opinion, one of the worst
problems we face.

Of course there are many other problems. You can't read someone his face
over the Internet. Therefore it happens from time to time that
communication is misread. This mostly results in some hard words going
from one end to the other, after which is established it was a misread.
Of course mostly the damage is done at that stage. But, this is all very
common for an Internet managed project.

>> >> What benefits are there to working virtually?

We have people from all over the world. From Canada to Germany, although
most of the developers are from The Netherlands for some unknown reason.
This, I am sure, is just a coincidence. That is one of the biggest
benefits. You can have the biggest minds working for your project,
without moving them to one place on the world.
Others are that you can work in your own time in your own way. For
example, I like loud music, where I know some others like absolute silence.

To answer what kind of hardware, software and procedures we use:

Software: we use bug-tracking software to keep track of bugs and patches
of users. We use a todo-tracker internally to keep track of things we
think should be done. For the rest we use a wiki to put documentation
on, make use of doxygen to comment our code, and use a forum to stay in
touch with OpenTTD gamers.

Hardware: nowadays we managed to centralize most of the stuff. We have 2
major places where stuff is located: in .nl and in .hu. Stuff is
balanced between those 2 places. Slowly we are in the process of making
mirrors, as the project is growing bigger and bigger.

Procedures: there are a few set procedures how to do what. Lately I
focused most of my time to make a few more. Then I talk about things
like: how to make a release, how to make a nightly, how to make a
bundle, how to make a... This isn't really documented yet, but this is
slowly being done.

Back in 2003, only 'ludde' ran the project (yes, this project is just 3
years old, almost 4). He knew how to do stuff, but he was the only one
who did. When ludde left, others already joined and were taking over
stuff. Everything was not really centralised and was poor of
communication.

Most of my and MiHaMiX (we both manage all hardware and
software) efforts went in the last 2 years in making this better and
better. Too bad most of the 'old' people don't like those improvements,
and so the deploy of it goes slow. The argument mostly is: "it always
worked this way, so why change it?". Still, slowly we manage to put in
new stuff. To give some examples:
In the old days the whole project was around SourceForge. SourceForge is
nice, till a certain point. So, we no longer use the SF bug-tracker, as
it just sucks (sorry, no other words for it). We now distribute files
via Torrent too, and soon a non-SF http mirror will be available.

Other things that are planned to do, to improve the coding-speed mostly,
is to have a site where you can upload a patch, which gets compiled
automatically. The next step will be that users can do this, and post
their changes on the web. Users can then post their comments on the
changes, so developers know if it is a good change or not. This to
improve the gap between users and developers.

Anyway, I have no idea if any of what I said is anything you wanted to
know. If you have any other questions we are more then happy to help you
out. As you might have read between the lines in the above, the current
communication is far from optimal in the current situation. For sure we
work on that every day, but it is hard to manage a team over the
Internet. Mostly because people can unexpectedly disappear, as we
noticed a few times in the past.

With kind regards,

Patric 'TrueLight' Stout
Retired OpenTTD Developer

-- 
Mark Kelly
Manager - Information Systems
McKinnon Secondary College
McKinnon Rd McKinnon 3204, Victoria, Australia
Direct line / Voicemail: 8520 9085
School Phone +613 8520 9000 << new number!
School Fax   +613 9578 9253

Webmaster - http://www.mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au
IT Lecture notes: http://vceit.com
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Doctor - We must all face reality sooner or later.
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say I won out over it.  ('Harvey', 1950)

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