[Koha] [Koha-devel] Koha development

[Marshall Breeding]

Brendan,

Some personnel FTE numbers from last year can be seen on the tables from the Library Systems Report:
http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org/files/content/Charts_MarshallBreeding.pdf

The numbers are for the company overall, and not limited to efforts expended on specific products or projects.

-marshall

From: Brendan Gallagher [mailto:info at bywatersolutions.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 3:04 PM
To: Tomas Cohen Arazi
Cc: Marshall Breeding; koha at lists.katipo.co.nz; koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org
Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] [Koha] Koha development

I would be much happier using the numbers that Tomás pointed out (which is a much different story then FTE).  Marshall could you maybe ask these proprietary companies to match our numbers, instead of the other way around - then you'd get a much better idea of what's actually happening.

For example, we have about 3000 patches submitted a year from close to 100 different authors.  Let's just say that it's 6 hours average to write and submit the patches (so we are at 18,000 hours there), then it's 3 hours average to sign off the patches (9,000 hrs), then 3 hours average to QA the patches (another 9,000 hrs).   Thats 9 FTE right there (and that's being generous with my averaging - also those FTE aren't checking facebook etc ;) )   And that is only a small portion of the whole picture, I haven't even gotten into the RMs or RMaints responsibilities or anything that goes with packaging the release, then we've got all the documentation people too.  OR even the amount of time to manage such large amounts of code (which I'm sure the proprietaries are counting in their results).

Please anyone adjust my numbers above and I'm only just really guessing and the amount of time to write the patches in the first place should could needs to be doubled to 12 hours on average.

Just some food for thought.  Also we'd be interested in what the blackbox/closed systems are reporting for your question?

On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Tomas Cohen Arazi <tomascohen at gmail.com<mailto:tomascohen at gmail.com>> wrote:
I'm not sure how to count it either. This would be my estimate.

I spend 50% of my time doing Release Manager duties, the rest is spent working on development and documentation. But if I count the amount of hours I work for Koha, I should count a total of 1.3 FTE, I guess. If I count Bernardo, it'd be something like:

Universidad Nacional de Cordoba (Tomas + Bernardo)
Quality Assurance: 0.6 FTE + 0,1 FTE = 0.6 FTE
Development: 0.5 FTE + 0.1 FTE = 0.6 FTE
Documentation:  0.2 FTE

Community participation is difficult to count.

I'm interested on the numbers you can collect. My hypothesis would be that more development allocation is available than most proprietary ILS products. Of course it fluctuates every year, but the OpenHub numbers speak of themselves 88 contributors for 2014. Unfortunately I cannot find a way to get the COCOMO-model invested working hours.

Good luck, Marshall!


On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Marshall Breeding <marshall.breeding at librarytechnology.org<mailto:marshall.breeding at librarytechnology.org>> wrote:
Paul,

This estimate helps quite a bit.  Part of what I'm working toward is being able to have a figure for Koha that corresponds to what the vendors developing proprietary products allocate to product development.  They also have lots of staff devoted to things like marketing and administration, but the point of comparison is the FTE allocated to development.  My hypothesis is that the overall development allocation for Koha is similar to that for proprietary ILS products and I hope to be able to document that to some degree.

-marshall



-----Original Message-----
From: koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org<mailto:koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org> [mailto:koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org<mailto:koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org>] On Behalf Of Paul Poulain
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 11:03 AM
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz<mailto:koha at lists.katipo.co.nz>; koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org<mailto:koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org>
Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] [Koha] Koha development

Le 12/02/2015 15:07, Marshall Breeding a écrit :
> To the Koha development community,
Hi Marshall,
> Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity?
>
Really : it's impossible to evaluate properly.
some numbers can be evaluated, some can't.

For example, BibLibre :
  * has Jonathan working full time on Koha. Half time dedicated to the community, half time dedicated to development sponsored by customers (but still on Koha, and for a direct benefit of the Koha community). So, OK, jonathan = 1 FTE
  * has Fridolin being Release Maintainer. He releases a version every month (4 hours to package it, roughly), plus a variable number of hours to push patches (between 1 and 10 ? it depends on what is waiting to be pushed. Let's say an average of 5 hours). 1 version every month, 9 hours per version = 9*12 = 118 (this number is wrong, it's an estimate)
  * has a support team of 3 (including fridolin), that regularly submit bugfixes. Frankly, we don't count the specific time dedicated to fixing a bug and submitting a patch vs the time dedicated to the customer.
  * has other developers regularly submitting patches (julian, matthias,
...)
  * has me ... who does not submit patches anymore, but I'm trying to organize all the work at BibLibre, do some non-dev things for the community. Should I count this ? I think yes, because (I hope), the project also move through non technical work.
  * has all our staff participate to the hackfest in Europe, 1 full week in march = 17*40 ?
  * has 2 or more ppl going to the KohaCon every year.

Overall, I really really can't calculate the involvment of BibLibre as you ask, I'm sorry. Maybe saying 3 FTE is a rough-not-illogic estimate, but it's an estimate !

HTH

--
Paul Poulain, Associé-gérant / co-owner
BibLibre, expert du logiciel libre pour les bibliothèques BibLibre, Open Source software for libraries expert

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