Working with Upstream Maintainership at Linaro
- julianus.larson
If you are a maintainer of open source software and working for Linaro you have come to the right place. This work is very important to Linaro and data about the work is collected to use for attracting members, marketing, member brochures, the company web page and to enable Linaro with members to be able to follow up on achievements. To be able to track the work done maintaining software there are certain things you must do. This page aims to explain the steps needed.
Get manager approval
Being an open source maintainer is something you are, independent of your employment at Linaro. However, if the maintainership is inline with Linaro’s and Linaro member interests you can be allowed to do some maintaienrship during work hours. Typically there is a cap around 10% of your time, but you need to discuss this with your manager.
Contact a project/program manager to get added to the Kantata UM project
Once you have approval from your manager you need to be able to report the time spent on upstream maintainership in Kantata. All project/program managers can help to add you to the project in Kantata. If they can’t do it themselves, they know who can do it.
Also let the project/program manager know how much time to allocate for you doing upstream maintainership.
Reporting in the UM project
It is important to understand that upstreaming code in your daily work is usually not part of the UM project. The code being upstreamed is usually developed in another project and that project must also pay for the upstreaming. However, reviewing merge request not issued by a Linaro project, working with releasing open source software, being part of the open source project’s community are examples of upstream maintainership.
When you report time on the Upstream Maintainership project you should select the task that corresponds to the open source project you are working on. If you can’t find your project, then use the task ‘Other open source project'.
The UM Jira project
The UM Jira project will no longer be as important as before. You are no longer required to estimate time on the card and you no longer need to have a card. There was even an idea to remove the whole project and just report time on the correct task in Kantata, but the decision is to keep the project as many engineers use it to keep track of their maintainerships and include there cards in reports and sprints.
If you want to use the UM Jira project some rules apply:
You should have a story card for each of your maintainerships
The title of the card shall describe what you are a maintainer of
No story cards shall exist that describe anything other than a specific maintainership
If you want to group your cards for some reason, use an epic card or innitiative card.
If you want to track your activities as a maintainer use sub task cards or merely comments in your story cards.