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Ubuntu's development team

Zimmerman keeps track of the project all the time, ensuring close communication among team members, which is a different organization. First of all, although Canonical has set up offices in several countries, most of Zimmerman's engineers do not work there.

"my team has about 120 people, but fewer than five people stay in the office for a long time," Zimmerman said, adding that he regularly communicates face-to-face with team members on an equal basis every quarter, but it takes patience and courage to really stick to it, and Zimmerman did it, so he succeeded. But Zimmerman says there are ways to communicate regularly. For example, Zimmerman says Canonical engineers do a lot of things through IRC,Wiki and conference calls, and the team uses open source Gobby tools to collaborate and build voice chat rooms using Mumble.

"Mumble is like an IRC that supports voice," Zimmerman said. "you can set up a set of channels, and team members can go to different channels to find relevant people to communicate with them, and they can go in and out of these channels freely, just like entering and leaving a room."

Engineering organizations often like to use whiteboards to share ideas, and Ubuntu teams are no exception. Although Canonical employees and Ubuntu contributors are dispersed in the field, Zimmerman says a lot of things are done by sharing desktops and screens, but he admits that no matter how advanced collaborative technology is, there is no substitute for one-on-one whiteboard communication.

The development process of Ubuntu

As for overall project goal management, Canonical uses its own Launchpad platform. "Launchpad provides some basic project management support, and we are also developing other tools to implement tracking," Zimmerman said.

Zimmerman controls the overall management blueprint of the project. Canonical has special tools to extract data from Launchpad to make reports. The key part of the report that Zimmerman sees most is the combustion diagram, which is an important element of Scrum agile software development methods.

"it's essentially a bar chart that shows how much work is left in your iteration," Zimmerman said. "suppose the project has a total of 200 tasks, draw a trend line from 200 to 0 according to your plan, and draw a real progress trend on the chart according to the actual progress during the project. * it usually draws a curve, which means that the project deviates from your plan. We can learn about the progress of the project in real time through the combustion chart.

Although Zimmerman also uses Scrum-style combustion charts to track project progress, he says he does not strictly adhere to a specific development approach.

Zimmerman points out that after using some elements of the Scrum method, he can report based on the team's production capacity. "We can know exactly how many tasks can be accomplished over a period of time to make the next prediction more accurate," he said.

Ubuntu's links with Debian and the community

From a testing point of view, the Ubuntu engineering organization has a number of tasks going on concurrently. Zimmerman said that hardware certification testing runs day and night in the hardware lab, and tests such as compatibility are fully automated. In addition, testing for upgrades from older versions is fully automated and, of course, manual testing, but this task is usually done by the Ubuntu community. (speaking of communities, please refer to how the open source community works here-Ubuntu)

Ubuntu developers do not operate in a vacuum, they are also part of the upstream open source ecosystem, they contribute most upstream software patches, and sometimes Ubuntu releases patches for related vulnerabilities before the upstream.

"We release patches ahead of the upstream mainly to meet our deadlines, and our goal is to make delta smaller, and we spend a lot of engineering time on upstream patches for each release cycle," Zimmerman said.

Ubuntu also relies heavily on its relationship with Debian Linux distributions. Zimmerman points out that most Ubuntu patches submitted to Debian are accepted, and as for other upstream projects, Ubuntu really doesn't have much effort to contribute to them.

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