Organization of the development team
This page documents how we intend to work as a team. It’s particularly relevant for developers paid by Freexian, but can be useful for others too.
Roles
This documentation refers to a few different roles:
Developer: implements the requested features
Project manager: coordinates the team and the work
Architect: takes the biggest design decisions (interfaces, software’s structure, choices of technologies)
Community manager: manages relationships with Debian and other free software communities
Each team member can have multiple roles.
Project management
Work is planned in GitLab issues on the Debusine repository. See project management practices for more information about this.
The project managers share regular status updates to the team.
Development workflow
The developers can self-assign issues from the milestones of the current
quarter
(ex: 2025-Q2 Maintenance for the maintenance milestone of the second
quarter of 2025). They should usually start with the highest priority
issues (those with label P1, then P2 and finally P3).
Other guidelines relative to development can be found in the sections Contribute to Debusine and Coding practices.
You are encouraged to create draft merge requests quite early in your work, in particular when you have doubts about some design choices and would like to have feedback.
About code reviews
Code reviews are mandatory to get any significant code contribution merged. Developers should thus always submit merge requests for any non-trivial change.
Developers should prioritize code reviews over development work so as to not stall development work for others, and ensure timely and regular merge of new code.
All non-trivial merge requests (such as new features) have to be reviewed and approved by a core developer or architect. Initial code reviews can be picked up by anyone. We highly encourage everyone to do such code reviews so as to get familiar with more parts of the codebase. To avoid duplication of work, reviewers should mark themselves as such when they start a review.
If reviewers only review some aspect of the code, they should make that clear in their review comments. Developers should seek out extra reviewers as needed, based on the complexity of their change.
During code reviews, you should ensure that:
coding practices have been respected
the commit history is clean (good commit messages, meaningful split of commits, any fixup commit is clearly targeted to be autosquashed)
unit tests are meaningful and readable without (too much) duplication
the code actually implements the initial request
You can also suggest improvements and/or simplifications based on your own experience and knowledge of the codebase.
Coordination and communication tools
The bulk of the work happens asynchronously and transparently on GitLab issues and merge requests. But we have also have real time communication channels with IRC and Matrix.
GitLab
Watching the whole project is not required. Depending on your preferences, you could however configure custom notifications to watch at least “New merge request” and “Merge merge request” events.
You also have the possibility to subscribe to issues with a specific label by clicking on the “Subscribe” button next to each label on the Labels page. Following “Design discussion” can be interesting if you want to contribute to the overall design.
IRC channels / Matrix
Presence on the #debusine IRC channel (or the corresponding Matrix room) is highly recommended to facilitate real time cooperation and coordination. For instance, it can be used to share the work load of code reviews, so that they are spread across all developers. It can also be used to avoid code conflicts when two developers are working on related parts.
The #debusine-notifications IRC channel (or the corresponding Matrix room) offers an alternate way to consume the GitLab-based notifications (pushes, merge requests, issues).
Current team organization
People in bold are the main actors for each role. The others are in support or as backup when the main person is not available.
Core developers
Carles Pina
Colin Watson
Enrico Zini
Stefano Rivera
Project manager
Stefano Rivera
Colin Watson
Raphaël Hertzog
Architect
Colin Watson
Raphaël Hertzog
Community manager
Enrico Zini
Stefano Rivera