Heavy Duty: What Project Hosting Users are Doing

In July, the Project Hosting team announced the People sub-tab where project members can easily document their duties within their projects.


Here are the top ten most frequently selected project duties:

1. Lead by providing a project vision and roadmap
2. Design new features, write code and unit tests
3. Design core libraries, write code and unit tests
4. Have fun hacking and learn new stuff!
5. Test the system before each release
6. Review code changes and provide constructive feedback
7. Plan the scope of release milestones and track progress
8. Lead the UI design and incorporate feedback
9. Write end-user documentation and examples
10. Triage new issues and support requests from end-users

Those frequent duties are a testament to the serious and thoughtful software development processes often found in open source development. But, open source is not all hard work: our users also decided that it was important to document some of their more colorful duties.  Those ranged from general, "Be awesome," to vicarious, "Watch nervously as students write code," to self-effacing, "Create elaborate unit tests for small corners of the library, write hilariously malformed XML comments, and mercilessly break the build," to simply practical leadership, "Buy the pizza for everyone else."

Don't skip your duty to write your own! Just click the People sub-tab and start to document what you and your project team are supposed to be doing.

By Jason Robbins, Google Code Team