Development Process

Overview

The Cloud Foundry OSS Project has adopted the Pivotal Labs processes for software development, also sometimes referred to as the Pivotal way (pdf slides or slideshare).

Some notable elements to this process are described below.

Who

• for each sub-team, one-backlog of work (see the Cloud Foundry Pivotal Tracker projects)
• one product manager embedded and immediately accessible to the team to define and answer questions about 'the what'
• one team anchor to facilitate team logistics and engineering process
• one team of developers that decide 'the how'

How

• brief daily team standup
• weekly Iteration Planning Workshop (aka an IPM) - typically done at the beginning of the week
• weekly team retrospective
• once every several months a project inception to build out high level workstreams for the next few months

When

• depends on where the team is located, most of them are in San Francisco today and work 9am-6pm PST
• also teams in Boulder, Colorado, NY City, New York, and London (England), Germany, Sydney (Australia) and China that work on local time zones

Dojo

Several community members have experienced the Pivotal way by embedding with the Cloud Foundry team at the Pivotal offices in downtown San Francisco with the Cloud Foundry Dojo program. The program ideally requires a six week commitment to join one of the Cloud Foundry teams in-person and work on the OSS project the way the Cloud Foundry team works. Organizations such as Cloud Credo, IBM, Altoros, Fujitsu and SAP have sent participants to embed in the Dojo program. We have also had other organizations work out of the SF office with us from Accenture, Swisscom, AnyNines and Stark and Wayne to collaborate on Cloud Foundry related activities.

Community Developers

Not everyone that wishes to participate in developing Cloud Foundry is able or willing to join the Cloud Foundry team for six weeks. GitHub Pull Requests have proven to be a successful way to collaborate and accept contributions from remote contributors. Cloud Foundry developers rotate through a 'community pair' assignment that are responsible for reviewing and accepting external contributions.