distributed teams and eclipse

Distributed Teams and Eclipse:

Developing Over the Miles

Brian FitzpatrickSr. Software Engineer, JBoss at Red Hat March 25, 2010

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Welcome!

During this talk we're going to talk a bit about: Distributed Teams Our Scenario at Red Hat Current solutions And a few common sense tips...

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But first a brief introduction...

Who am I? What's my story? Why talk about distributed teams?

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What is a distributed team?

Sometimes called “virtual” teams

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What is a distributed team?

Sometimes called “virtual” teams Distributed times are “distributed” across time or space

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What is a distributed team?

Sometimes called “virtual” teams Distributed times are “distributed” across time or space Typically focused on a single task or supporting a

single product/project

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What is a distributed team?

Sometimes called “virtual” teams Distributed times are “distributed” across time or space Typically focused on a single task or supporting a

single product/project In theory anyway...

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My Old View of Distributed Teams...

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My NEW View of Distributed Teams...

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What about you?

Do any of you work in similar environments?

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More than Space... Time is the major factor

On a regular basis, conversations with multiple times and places:

California [GMT -8] Denver [GMT -7] Atlanta [GMT -6] Boston [GMT -5] Ontario [GMT -5] Dublin [GMT]

Switzerland [GMT +1] Brno [GMT +1] Minsk [GMT +2] Beijing [GMT +8] Tokyo [GMT +9]

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Beyond Time and Space...

What are the other issues?

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Beyond Time... Other Issues #1 - Language

English is a great common language for technical conversations

But... it's not without its challenges. Accents, grammatical differences, transmission issues

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Other Issues #2 - Screen sharing and OS limitations

Screencasts Screen captures Wikis, Documents, PDFs

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Other Issues #3 - Patches and Code Reviews

Bug Tracking Code Reviews

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What about you?

What other issues do you encounter?

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What we do today...

JIRA Mailing Lists and E-mail IRC Chat Wikis Screencasts Patches Log files Console Output...

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Where we run into issues...

Sharing issues Multiple locations Inconsistent Reproducing issues

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What tools we use (mostly)...

Pidgin (IM/IRC) Camstasia/Jing (Screencasts) IE/Firefox/Chrome for Wiki editing Eclipse JIRA & SVN integration Mylyn

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Where Eclipse can help...

ECF Bug System Integration Code Reviews in the Tooling More source code control options...

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Where Eclipse needs some help...

Improved ECF Contact/Connection Management Built-in logging and log management for ECF chats More screen capture options Something like Google Buzz or Google Wave

(See Bugzilla 280347)

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Opportunities Exist for Improvement and Innovation

Integrated and standalone tools for distributed teams More resources for integrators trying to create such

tools People to test drive and provide feedback for early

versions of such tools

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Bottom Line

We're all over the world. Eclipse is a good environment for a single developer,

but could be great with more multiple developer use cases.

And there are many opportunities to make things better.

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Tips for Distributed Teams

Face to Face Meetings – Annual or more often if possible

Important to have a “Glue” person to keep things on task

Settle on consistent technology TDD and Continuous Integration

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Thanks!

Enjoy the rest of the conference!