Release Engineering in the classroom

The second week of October, I had the pleasure of presenting lectures on release engineering to university students in Montreal as part of the PLOW lectures at École Polytechnique de Montréal.    Most of the students were MSc or PhD students in computer science, with a handful of postdocs and professors in the class as well. The students came from Montreal area universities and many were international students. The PLOW lectures consisted of several invited speakers from various universities and industry spread over three days.

View looking down from the university

Université de Montréal administration building

École Polytechnique building.  Each floor is painted a different colour to represent a differ layer of the earth.  So the ground floor is red, the next orange and finally green.

The first day, Jack Jiang from York University gave a talk about software performance engineering.

The second day, I gave a lecture on release engineering in the morning.  The rest of the day we did a lot of labs to configure a Jenkins server to build and run tests on an open source project. Earlier that morning, I had setup m3.large instances for the students on Amazon that they could ssh into and conduct their labs.  Along the way, I talked about some release engineering concepts.  It was really interesting and I learned a lot from their feedback.  Many of the students had not been exposed to release engineering concepts so it was fun to share the information.

Several students came up to me during the breaks and said "So, I'm doing my PhD in release engineering, and I have several questions for you" which was fun.  Also, some of the students were making extensive use of code bases for Mozilla or other open source projects so that was interesting to learn more about.  For instance one research project looking at the evolution of multi-threading in a Mozilla code bases, and another student was conducting bugzilla comment sentiment analysis.  Are angry bug comments correlated with fewer bug fixes?  Looking forward to the results of this research!

I ended the day by providing two challenge exercises to the students that they could submit answers to.  One exercise was to setup a build pipeline in Jenkins for another open source project.  The other challenge was to use a the Jenkins REST API to query the Apache projects Jenkins server and present some statistics on their build history.  The results were pretty impressive!

My slides are on GitHub and the readme file describes how I setup the Amazon instances so Jenkins and some other required packages were installed before hand.  Please use them and distribute them if you are interested in teaching release engineering in your classroom.

Lessons I learned from this experience:

• Computer science classes focus on writing software, but not necessarily building it is a team environment. So complex branching strategies are not necessarily a familiar concept to some students.  Of course, this depends on the previous work experience of the students and the curriculum at the school they attend. One of students said to me "This is cool.  We write code, but we don't build software".
• Concepts such as building a pipeline for compilation, correctness/performance/
  regression testing, packing and deployment can also be unfamiliar.   As I said in the class, the work of the release engineer starts when the rest of the development team things they are done :-)
• When you're giving a lecture and people would point out typos, or ask for clarification I'd always update the repository and ask the students to pull a new version.  I really liked this because my slides were in reveal.js and I didn't have to export a new PDF and redistribute.  Instant bug fixes!
• Add bonus labs to the material so students who are quick to complete the exercises have more to do while the other students complete the original material.  Your classroom will have people with wildly different experience levels.

The third day there was a lecture by Michel Dagenais of Polytechnique Montréal on tracing heterogeneous cloud instances using https://lttng.org/  (tracing framework for Linux).  The Eclipse trace compass project also made an appearance in the talk. I always like to see Eclipse projects highlighted.  One of his interesting points was that none of the companies that collaborate on this project wanted to sign a bunch of IP agreements so they could collaborate on this project behind closed doors.  They all wanted collaborate via an open source community and source code repository.  Another thing he emphasized was that students should make their work available on the web, via GitHub or other repositories so they have a portfolio of work available.  It was fantastic to seem him promote the idea of students being involved in open source as a way to help their job prospects when they graduate!

Thank you Foutse and  Bram  for the opportunity to lecture at your university!  It was a great experience!  Also, thanks Mozilla for the opportunity to do this sort of outreach to our larger community on company time!

Also, I have a renewed respect for teachers and professors.  Writing these slides took so much time.  Many long nights for me especially in the days leading up to the class.  Kudos to you all who do teach everyday.

References
The slides are on GitHub and the readme file describes how I setup the Amazon instances for the labs

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In open source, all you have is social capital

Over a month ago, I watched this keynote by David Eaves that he gave at DjangoCon. Yes, I'm way behind on the list of things I'd like to blog about. I blame Bugzilla :-) Also, quite a few people at EclipseCon Europe came up to me and mentioned that they really enjoyed reading my blog. Thanks - I enjoy writing!



David Eaves is a negotiation consultant. He helps people on opposite sides of an issue come to an agreement, and has clients in open data, government, industry, and open source communities. He has done work at Mozilla to help manage contributor engagement and implement measures to keep contributors working in the community.

He starts off by telling the story, that as part of of his work with Mozilla, he thinks that he should submit a bug. He submits his first Thunderbird bug and announces on Twitter or Facebook that he's excited to submit his first bug. To which he gets the reply "I bet it's a duplicate".  According to this presentation, 50% of all bugs are duplicates.  It may be a duplicate, but this response isn't the best approach to encouraging future participation from a new contributor.

He then says that most open source communities don't have financial capital.  They don't have money flowing in to influence people.  "All you have is social capital".  Social capital consists of the people that contribute to your community and make it successful.  In theory, in a corporation, human resources tracks how to retain and manage its people.  In open source, we spend very little time managing our social capital or even better, tracking  it.

He then continues that one of the mantras of open source is that it's a meritocracy and your coding skills are the key to success within the community.  But if you look at people who have spent a lot of time in an open source community and are considered leaders,  many of them spend a lot more time working with people and  managing their community as opposed to coding.  To which he says "We pull people in based on their coding skills, and we promote people based on their negotiation skills".  Also, he remarks that nobody tells us that, and that we all stress that technical skills trumpet negotiation skills despite the evidence to the contrary.

He then gives examples of funny or misunderstood Mozilla bugs.  He states how it's harder to communicate with people when only via the written word.  I find that myself.  I've met quite a few people at conferences who I've found to be rude in Bugzilla to only find that in person they seem like a totally different person.  Reasonable.  Friendly.  Helpful.  Anyways, since Bugzilla is a written medium he suggests that the best way to interact on it is to ask questions.  He states that often people just have a solution in mind as a bug fix and aggressively push their solution where in fact they should ask the user what they want to do in the first place.  Also, you should paraphrase and repeat what the user said to gain understanding, acknowledge the problem and advocate for a solution. All great advice!

The next section of the talk discusses the architecture of a community.  Fork used to be a four letter word in open source  But with the advent of GitHub, it's not, but rather a way to empower the user.  It also absolves you from seeking anyone's permission before contributing.  He says we need to design our communities to "Architect for cooperation and away from collaboration"  It's great if a new contributor can start fixing a problem without the transaction costs associated with interacting with a committer.  We can spend our time on other tasks.  He also states that we need to empower the lowest people on the stack, such as those triaging bugs.  He also remarks that immediately marking a bug as invalid without acknowledgement of the effort required to report it doesn't build community loyalty.

GitHub Octocat

Image ©sunfox, http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunfox/4365495446/  licensed under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

The final section of the talk described applying metrics to the show what is going on in a project.  To measure contributor patches from non-paid staff is a way to measure social capital.  To determine why people have stopped contributing.  To measure wait time for before a patch is submitted.  He also states that it would be interesting to have a repository API and once you attach a patch to a bug, it would update the bug with the anticipated  wait time, to set expectations for the reporter.  He states that Wikipedia segments users based on metrics and they applies actions, such as suggesting mentors for new contributors.

I think having metrics for new Eclipse contributors would be very interesting.  I rarely have people contributing patches to my bucket other than from other Eclipse or Equinox project committers, but I'm sure the metrics would be very interesting for other components.   It would also be valuable to determine the reason that people stop contributing, and implement measures to encourage people to continue to their involvement.

He finishes by stating that there needs to be a social infrastructure for the community, not just code.  Also, in some cases, you many need to remove people from the community to reduce negative social capital.  A great talk, I highly recommend  it - extremely informative and funny. 


Notes:
 
David Eaves also blogs at http://www.eaves.ca on open data, open source and other interesting topics.
His keynote is here http://blip.tv/djangocon/keynote-david-eaves-5571777

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