Fishbowl FAQ

This FAQ is an attempt to answer some of the common questions people may have about the Fishbowl process. If you have a question that you think should be added here, please mail it to [email protected].

• Why do we need a "process" at all?

  Successful software development, especially for a relatively complex beast like Zope, is about more than just writing code. To create (and maintain) a solid product, the people involved in development need to have common goals and a common approach that allows them to make good decisions and execute as a team. An ad-hoc approach doesn't scale, particularly not in a very distributed community environment.

  A well-known process gives us the common approach we need to ensure good decisions and execution. It also reduces the overhead of development - we don't have to say "ok, where do we start?" every time we want to do something. We always know where to start, what the next step is and when we're done. A common documented process also makes it much easier for new people to get up to speed and contribute.

• I have change/feature to add that is way too small to go through all of this fishbowl stuff. What should I do?

  People often have small changes or feature requests for which the whole fishbowl process would be overkill. There needs to be featherweight way of getting these ideas in play.

  For now, the way to do this is to add a feature request entry to the Collector (preferably with a patch or links to a patch).

  My hope is that we will be able to pay more attention to these items than we have in the past. From time to time, we'll grab some feature requests from the Collector and put them up for voting in the developer list for sanity checking. If people are generally for the patch, it will get checked in.

  We're open to feedback on how to make the process for small changes better - but hopefully this will be adequate for now.

More to come!