[2885] in Release_7.7_team
Search for Athena contractor abandoned.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Mon Jul 30 18:06:17 2001
Message-ID: <8vNRdGtz000110l54g@mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 22:06:10 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: adolan@MIT.EDU, rferrara@MIT.EDU, tomt@MIT.EDU
CC: vkumar@MIT.EDU, longpd@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
Summary:
We're abandoning the search for temporary help, and focusing on the
longer term, sustainable resourcing issues.
We didn't get the extra outside help we wanted, but managed to get
some extra help.
I'm sending this note to be explicit: We did a balancing act
amongst getting others to help, pursuing a contractor, and cutting
back as much work as we dared. Our next strategic task is answering
the long term resourcing question, recognizing that this past year
we were on the margin.
Detail:
Back in May, Bob Ferrara and Allison Dolan, authorized me to pursue
getting a short term contractor to help with the roll-out of Athena 9.0.
A description of the work and a timeframe for the contract was crafted.
Several promising leads were pursued.
We scheduled the work of the search around the primary obligation of
actually shipping the Athena release. This meant that we could not
spend too much effort on the search, and that the candidate pool was
narrowed to the very few who could come on board without requiring any
training.
While we pursued the search we also asked others around the office to
chip in on the Athena release:
Student programmer Mitch Berger took time away from his Kerberos
work and made himself useful testing, and providing several patches
that have user-visible impact on the update process, and the look of
xlogin.
Student programmer Chris Beland made the focus of his AUI assignment
the tracking of bugs, and the resolving of important user interface
issues. He put in extra time testing and debugging.
Garry Zacheiss, now officially 40% on Athena development, put more
than his budgeted 40% in at times helping out with a variety of
issues beyond his documented Open AFS work.
Jonathon Weiss normally puts 15% of his time (my guestimate)
helping out with Athena development on bug tracking. He put in
significant extra time testing the SunBlade 100, answering end-user
questions, helping keep external relations organized, and making
sure that all the Athena Server Operations handoffs were smooth.
Todd Belton also put in some time on AUI issues before focusing on
SAP Web work.
Larry Stone put in some effort on Nautilus and other low level GNOME
library work.
Bob Basch, balancing Long Jobs work, exceeded my expectations in his
contributions to AUI and general Athena testing and debugging.
Through the extra effort of these people, and others who also chipped in
every so often, we managed fill in some of the resource gap and to ship
Athena 9.0 last week without significant, user-visible mishap. We
believe that, though there were additional things we would have liked to
do for this release, we managed to get the most critical things done
with adequate quality on time.
I am writing you this note to let you know that the Athena UNIX Platform
Team has agreed that the appropriate action at this time is to abandon a
search for a contractor, and shift our focus to understanding the long
term resource needs of the Athena Unix Platform Team, and the
priority-relationship with other teams so that we understand what
resources we should be getting.
My thanks to all for the help and support.
-wdc
