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YaST Team Charter

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José Iván López edited this page Apr 7, 2021 · 2 revisions

This is the YaST Team Charter, where we summarize our team values and norms. This document also defines our goals, missions and the strategies to achieve them. Everything collected here has been approved by the team, and it is intended to keep us all aligned.

Our Values

In YaST we believe in openness and public solutions, which implies public communication and Open Source whenever possible.

When working at YaST we always value:

  • public scrutiny, constructive criticism and collaboration,

  • individuals and interactions over processes and tools,

  • responding to change over following a plan.

Regarding the product of our work, we value:

  • readable, maintainable and well tested code, based on agreed decisions,

  • and software that meets the user’s real needs.

Norms

We do not impose strong norms, but in general we agree on the following when we are coding:

  • all the new code and documentation should pass a process of peer review,

  • new designs should be discussed before implementing them,

  • communication should happen whenever a need arises,

  • and new features should be presented to interested people and to the public in general.

In order to keep improving our team and its relationship with the outside world, we should:

  • share our knowledge in a constructive, nice and polite way with bug reporters, users, managers, QA staff and other stakeholders,

  • use open communication channels whenever possible (e.g., public email lists and IRC),

  • and at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Goals

Our main long-term team goals on which the team should be focused are:

  • to develop useful tools for installing and configuring SUSE products,

  • to solve customers' needs in a better way than existing solutions,

  • to help lowering the entry barrier to new technologies (e.g., Btrfs, systemd),

  • to offer a useful source of knowledge and experience for anyone implementing or designing solutions for system management or installation, and

  • to aim for technical excellence, sustainability and good design as closely as possible.

Mission

The mission of the Team to achieve our goals is:

  • to maintain our software and to develop new features, taking into account usability and sustainability,

  • to discover who our target users and customers are and what their current needs are,

  • to be innovative and proactive in both offering solutions and gathering feedback, and

  • to make it easy for us and others to develop new features and debug issues.

Strategies

And how can we achieve all that?

  • Get information from different sources and share them.

  • Re-evaluate if our current approaches are still the best (e.g. classical installer vs. image deployment).

  • Remove deprecated and obsolete software, trying to keep focused on what is still relevant and useful.

  • Offer good documentation, examples, direct help and support for L3, customers, etc.

  • Look at how other projects or communities solve similar problems.

  • Use learning and innovation time to improve our solutions.

  • Spread the word (e.g., blog).

Scope of the Team

In general, the team is in charge of:

  • Bare metal OS installation and upgrade, including special architectures and special hardware.

  • OS installation and upgrade on virtual machines.

  • Single machine unattended installation/upgrade and small-scale automation.

  • Configuration of a running system.

  • For both SLE and openSUSE products.

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