Parity Technologies

Curious @ParityTech about your development timelines from the perspective of programmer anarchy...Do you have defined or semi-defined milestones with hoped-for dates or date ranges or do you accept that releases will happen when they will, without expectation?

Not for everything, but for flagship products like Substrate / Polkadot we do and the curious thing is that those deadlines are usually met. I don't understand how it works myself, but after almost 2 years I suspended my disbelief that it does work.

I second that, there is the interesting effect that we are sometimes ahead of schedule. Maybe because we don't waste time in daily stand-ups. I really appreciate it to have no meetings at all. Progress and problems can be discussed on Riot.

Ahead of what schedule?

What do you mean?

Who sets the schedule that you're ahead of?

@gavofyork set a roadmap set for @polkadotnetwork and Substrate (that is now being released). Sometimes we work with partners like @energywebx that need some features in Parity-Ethereum for their chain, and then naturally whatever is decided on Ethereum Core Dev calls.

I am curious, how does planning for milestones work with "programmer anarchy"? How do you ensure no overlaps between tasks and how do people sync with each other if there are no meetings?

Each project has its own channel on Riot that people involved follow. We just talk to each other about what needs doing and assign issues on GitHub. Occasionally someone might be stuck waiting for some other PR to be merged, but there is always something else to do.

I wonder what the teams efficiency and quality is compared to teams doing agile. How do you do tasks that no one wants to do?

Also... could you do this if your product was bound to make revenue and have customer demans?

The nature of the work we do, and the fact that it is open source, is a major drive for a lot of people. I don't think this is a model that can be applied to very many companies.

However, has anything else been tried? Just trying to get a sense of comparison with your approach.

I don't think it's possible. There is not that many (which are reasonable big) companies which are following the same culture to compare with.. Take Valve, for instance. But they are not open-source.. Any other examples? Linux Foundation?

Of course it's possible. But its interesting you're comparing companies while it's actually projects that are open sourced. Also, OSS in crypto are financially backed (heavily). Perhaps you're referring to for profit companies managing OSS? However, that's not new.

We've operated similarly to this, works well when tasks/problems/issues are interesting and mentally engaging, difficulties arise with this when it comes to accountability and maintenance.

So this is how you got the two multi-sig smart contract bugs in a row? Better work on your team communication...