Had an all day meeting today about the possibility of moving the whole company to bugzilla- the first of four days of such meetings. It was really a blast- very cool to discuss the relative merits of closed and open bug systems, and how bugzilla could be made feature-competitive with more advanced closed systems. I expect that if we do settle on going this route, the bugzilla community will see a lot of code flowing out of Novell. Perhaps just as importantly, Novell will become a more open company (as opposed to a traditional company that just releases a lot of open code) and that will be pretty cool- we actually spent substantially more time today on the merits of open bug tracking than on any specifics of process or code. Everyone was pretty open to new ideas (once I was able to express them ;) and we had some really good conversations, even if some things died the death of a thousand caveats.
Novell meeting prep is sort of insane- when they came into our building (13 people, mostly from Provo but also from groups near Boston and from Nuremberg) they came not just with themselves, but wads of colored post-it notes, pens, even their own sketchpads. They even brought complete burned CDs of information. 159 documents on the CD in all. I did express disappointment it was not a populated bugzilla liveCD ;) Seriously, these people are professional meeters- it sort of creeps me out, but I’m also sort of in awe.
Andrew: I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that you’ve read ZAMM. I first picked it up at 13; I can’t say it exactly changed my life or anything, but I did find it positive and inspiring. Certainly something that has influenced (many years later) how I assess the quality of my software, if not my life.