July 5th, 2019 - Weekly update (Engineering)

Ecosystem Updates Weekly Forum Updates
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This is our fortnightly engineering update which happens after the conclusion of each 2-week engineering sprint. You can check out last week’s update for recent news on community and communications.

This last sprint was quite minimal due to Zcon1 and the 4th of July in the US. By next sprint’s ending, we should be caught up with a more substantial community update.

Arborist Team
This team focuses on development of the zcashd client, lightwalletd, librustzcash and protocol upgrades. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #community-arborist channel.

This week, the 2.0.6 release made progress that had to wait until after devs returned to their normal dev environment from Zcon1. The team tagged the release and working with the dev-infra team, created the 2.0.6 reproducible builds.

Development Infrastructure Team
The Development Infrastructure team ensures developers have the tools and infrastructure they need. Join this team in the #dev-infrastructure chat channel.

This team is continuing to finish the release and ensure all Debain9 upgrades are stable across the system. Additionally they are working on documentation describing some of the new process.

This team is also focused on website maintenance which we anticipate to finish next week. Until that concludes, updates on electriccoin.co are disabled, including the blog. Stay tuned.

Documentation Team
This team drives the curation and assists in the creation of documentation. Follow along in the #documentation chat channel. Check out the official Zcash documentation.

No updates this sprint cycle.

Ecosystem Team
This team is intended to work on projects that interface with external parties not including the zcashd core client and handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support.

No updates this sprint cycle.

Reference Wallet Team
This teams current charter is to build a Zcash reference wallet. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #community-wallet-team channel

The wallet team had a great time at Zcon1 meeting members of the community. This past sprint, we worked on a demo app for the conference, which allowed people to scan paper wallets and redeem the testnet ZEC for ECC swag. We learned a lot while building this app, and plan to push the improvements we made to the android app and lightwalletd into the reference wallet.

Product Team
This team leads product decisions and feature prioritization.

No updates this sprint.

Miscellaneous

Next Friday: Technical AMA w/ ECC team July 12, 2019 noon PDT

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Hi @paige

I was wondering do you keep stats like % of development resources working on each area

i.e. 34% developer resources on Arborist this sprint/month/year, whenever you feel like it. monthly would be great.

The next question is, and I know I have asked similar elsewhere so feel free to ignore it.

Do you keep stats like % of funding spent on each area?

For example whilst no sprint goals were set for the Ecosystem Team in this sprint they still cost money. I understand agile development.

Just because there were no sprint goals it probably means their work would be better suited to say putting one of them on squashing bugs with the Arborist Team, or helping some other team, etc. I don’t need to know this fine grained detail though. just rough estimates of the 100% manpower distribution.

I don’t think you should publish the financials, but the resource allocation of each team would be really cool to know. (and in the transparency report you could add what spending went to which team) I can see what they are up to and doing from these updates.

idk, is this something you record and if it is, would you consider publishing some limited information about it.

Thanks

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I don’t have stats like that. You can keep track of the various todos on each team via their GitHub project boards (linked as the title of each update above). There is significant crossover between team members already (especially the Arborist team since it has the most significant role) and common duties are shared across teams, for example PR reviews are essentially a company-wide task for engineers. We have internal tracking for engineer availability per team per sprint so that team leaders can set expectations for sprint goals but it hasn’t been updated since Zcon1 week because a lot of folks took the opportunity to go on vacation. This week should be a catch up week and we can look at that availability chart to see how we can generalize the data for possibly sharing in future community updates.

A note about ecosystem team: some of their tasks are not communicable if it has to do with supporting third-party services where it’s not our place to announce helping some wallet debug an issue (for example).

A final note: we also have a security team but due to the nature of their scope, we don’t include them in community updates.

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