Dash Core Group Q2 2018 Summary Call - 10 August 2018

[nmarley]

Would it be possible to have privatesend include one denomination lower, 0.001 dash, in the 12.4 release?

Is privatesend on mobile possible with the dips described for 12.4, or is evolution needed as well?

Yes, it would be possible. The denomination is already in the codebase, but currently commented out “until we need [it]“. How this is determined is based on market needs / community needs, as well as any other effects this might have on the network, and at the discretion of our development leadership.

The specific line of code is here: https://github.com/dashpay/dash/blo...6cb83890c579b1dc308a/src/privatesend.cpp#L256

(Note: If someone really wants to push for this, just open a PR to un-comment that line and see what happens -- you will get discussion from the Core devs / lead dev at the very least. No one at DCG is stopping anyone from taking action on this.)

And yes, privatesend will be possible with the deterministic MN list (DIP3) and SPV verification of the MN list (DIP4), both implemented in 12.4.

• Are there any updates from Dash Labs forthcoming and if so what are they?
  
  
• What is ASU currently researching and when can we expect more insights into scaling, block propagation, optimum node count etc.?
  
  
• Do you see collateralized mining as a feasible way to address the mining centralization problems that are plaguing cryptocurrency in general and, considering the slow upgrade process to 12.3, Dash in specific? Is anyone from Core seriously researching that solution?

Philipp answered the first already, and Darren answered the 2nd in the call.

Re: the slow upgrade process, our team is in contact with the mining pool and assisting with the upgrades. They are currently working thru their QA process and plan to upgrade to 12.4 soon. We are also maintaining close contact with them and assisting them with any technical support in order to smooth the transition in the future. We are not currently working on collateralized mining solutions, as our efforts have been focused on paving the way for the Evolution platform upgrade.

2) When will the community see something substantial from Evolution. We are all still living on faith. No substantial DIPs have been released etc despite having the patent filed for a long time etc

Many of the improvements this year are required for Evolution to work. E.g. DAPI and quorums can't work without a deterministic masternode list, which is DIP3. DIPs 2 + 3 + 4 are pretty substantial in my opinion, and we released those in May, and they will be implemented in 12.4. So can you help me understand what exactly you define as "substantial"? What would that look like to you?

After the release and open-sourcing of 13.0, is DCG planning to continue development of future versions 13.1, 14.0,...etc in a private repository? Or will the development of new versions move to public repos?

The main reason for not developing publicly was to preserve our market advantage. Now we have filed a patent, and as we release and make repositories public, we will have the first-mover advantage (being the first to innovate and implement). As such, there is no reason to continue development of those in private repositories once made public.

Further questions specifically on Dev team:

The following is cross posted from here: https://www.dashcentral.org/p/coreteamcomp0918

There are 30 full time development engineers working on Dash Evolution but each time Evolution deadlines keep getting pushed back. 30 Developers is a lot in the crypto space and currently we are going off blind faith that all these staff are in fact working full time i.e. at least 40 hours per week.

Therefore my question is how can we be certain that the dev team are infact working the full 40 hours per week on our projects work if they are in a distributed environment? What monitoring do you have to track their work and to ensure they are in fact working full time?

I don't think anyone from DCG ever stated that. It's 30 development staff, and they are not all full-time. They're also not all developers. One is a mathematician / scientist. One is technical writer / documentation.

We don't monitor our developers in this way and don't plan to. We have daily stand-ups and other kinds of scrum meetings (sprint planning, retrospectives). These sprint planning sessions result in "stories" / "tasks" , which are Agile terms for units of work to be done, and each has a unique ID. Developers do the work they are expected for a sprint. If the number of tasks (measured in "Story Points") falls below what's expected, we have a conversation.

It is not difficult to know who is working and who is not pulling their weight. Additionally, we don't assign assets (e.g. laptops), and therefore have no way to force our developers to install nanny software like you suggest, as they use their own personal machines. This is a startup environment, not an enterprise. Our work force is distributed across the globe, meaning different work times. Some work on weekends, some split days.

Most of the rest of this argument doesn't make sense because of your premise that we have 30 full-time developers. The hours worked depends on the agreed amount per contract, and as I said, not all engineering staff are developers.

May I ask what software are you using to manage the Agile implementation of the Dev team? If you are not using a software management for implementing Agile then you are most definitely not working optimally.

We use Jira.

What software are you using for the following:
Project management of the dev team?
Requirements management ?
TestCase management?
TestRun Management?
QA management?
Automated testing?
Source code control management (presumably you are using github for this?)

Project management of the dev team - Jira
Requirements management - Jira
TestCase management - Not entirely sure I understand your question. We build unit and integration tests into the repos, otherwise please clarify.
TestRun Management - Entirely sure I do not understand this question. (please clarify)
QA management - I will defer to our QA lead, and again, not entirely sure what you mean. "QA" is a big field.
Automated testing - We have a Travis-CI subscription and using it with our projects.
Source code control management - Yes, we use git and GitHub.

How do management keep track of the actual time spent on programming by each of the developers? One such service is screenshotmonitor.com have you implemented something like this? If not why not?

As I already explained, no. But that's not a good metric to track. One developer could spend 10 minutes on something and another developer 1 hour on a similar same thing. The output is all that matters.

I strongly suspect now that the management of the software development cannot be that efficient if you cannot commit to deadlines and meet them.

You're (only) partially right, and as explained elsewhere, our Agile initiative is helping us to manage development more efficiently. We are mid-way through a multi-week agile training workshop for all development teams. We are also building something that's never been done before and this presents unique challenges.

We were originally informed by Amanda B Johnson the first beta release of Evolution was to be around August of last year, with the release of the first stage at the end of 2017. Amanda was quoting sources from core. Now 12 months on we hear that it is being pushed back again.

Of course we need to ensure security of the system but this should have also been built into your estimates.

Waiting to see if there is any response from core on these and my other questions. Core team we need answers. If they are not forthcoming it is throwing doubt on DASH core team and therefore on DASH as an investment. I have major stake-holding in DASH. I need these answers if you are to retain my investment.

You're invested in Dash, not DCG. We are one single DAO funded company out of many. There are other ways of trying to increase the value of your investment. DCG cannot "retain" your investment. We don't see any of it. But your veiled threats to answer your questions or else you'll pull your investment are not cool. Divest yourself of it, if you want.

Question for Ryan Taylor: (Question originally posted in https://www.dashcentral.org/p/coreteamcomp0918 )
According Glenn Austin DASH currently has 30 core developers working full time along with additional staff for QA work and management however according to https://cryptomiso.com/ that compares different cryptocurrency coins in terms of coding activity DASH is currently ranked as 120th for the past 12 months in terms of coding activity.

Check here: https://cryptomiso.com/

At github the code contributors report after the date of 18th January 2014, when DASH was forked from Litecoin, shows a peak of coding activity in January 2015 and then shows a steady decline down to the current date. Currently the code contributions are the lowest rate it has been since DASH started: See this graph:

https://github.com/dashpay/dash/graphs/contributors?from=2015-01-19&to=2015-02-18&type=c

and here:
https://github.com/dashevo/dapi-db/pulse

Why does the github coding contributions report decline from Jan 2015 if we have taken on considerably more coders?

Additional information added 18/08/2018:
MNOs, investores and the DASH community can gain some indication of the development activity if the statistics for development of code in private repositories is set to be shown publically without us having access to the code itself.

How to make private repository statistics public for GitHub is explained on the pages after following these two links:

https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-your-profile/

https://help.github.com/articles/publicizing-or-hiding-your-private-contributions-on-your-profile/

The public statistics of development activity for the DASH Repositories is very low.

Have the core team made the *statistics* of coding activity in private repositories also private? If so why?

Keeping development statistics private for private repositories in effect means that nobody can track the progress of development other than the people who have access to the private repositories.

I'm asking the core team to explain why their public statistics for coding activity is so low considering we have 30 full-time developers?

How can the MNOs and the DASH community know for certain that the 30 full time developers are infact working full time? What measures have you taken to ensure our developers are, in fact, working the full time they have been contracted to work?

Have DASH core management considered using a service such as screenshotmonitor.com to monitor coding activity? If not why not?

1. He wrote "30 development staff", not 30 full-time developers. That also includes scientists/researchers and technical writers in the engineering organization.

2. You are only looking at one single public repo (the DashCore repo). We have many other public repos and we have private repos also.

3. The "private statistics" links you are referring to apply to individual user profiles, not organizations. Also, these do not show specifics, it just shows a graph (kinda like a histogram but with dots) with number of commits per day, and includes all public + private commits. That's it, it does not break down anything else, and it's only per-user.

However, I'd be happy to share commit statistics on a regular basis (say, monthly). I've been mulling this idea for months, since March / April timeframe, then Alex started sharing the "What's Going On" reports and I didn't think of it for a while.

 

[nmarley]

The great majority of the MNO and community questions where not answered on the call.

Questions and doubts remain in the community since these have not been answered. If they are not answered these doubts will only grow with time.

Do you really think it is a good idea for community members and MNOs to continue to have doubts?

We took the time to formulate and post these questions that we are having doubts about.

I suggest the core team consider scheduling another call to answer all questions by the community both here and in the Core funding proposals.

If you have questions about the engineering / tech, I'm happy to answer them. I'm also more happy to answer them when you ask without seething criticism or saying things like "pull your finger out". This forum has gotten toxic, and I don't like to hang around because of that. If everyone is nice it makes this a much better place to be.

Individual / specific questions are easier. If you post a huge block of text it will be harder. Those take longer to read and I'm sure I miss things. I'm usually not monitoring the forums so if you have a specific question that you think I can answer, please tag me.

I'd love to have an open / honest dialog, in the spirit of collaboration.

 

[TaoOfSatoshi]

This forum has gotten toxic, and I don't like to hang around because of that.

I understand that this is your opinion, @nmarley, but I fail to see how this forum is toxic now that Dash Nation moderation rules are in place. We don’t allow speculation as fact, as hominems or swearing. Me and my team have worked very hard to make the forum a great place to communicate and collaborate, in a respectful way. If you gave it a chance again, you may find it’s nowhere near the same as it used to be. If you find toxicity of any kind, please message me and it won’t last long.

 

[nmarley]

Thanks @TaoOfSatoshi, I appreciate your mod team's support in this.

Core - read my questions, read the questions from @DeepBlue, pull your finger out and be transparent....

I wonder what some of the leadership team do all day long? doesnt seem like anything of substance is being achieved....

The Whats going on with Dash reports is now a copy/paste job of getting bank accounts, typing the same reports month after month....not good enough.

By the way, Evolution had better be here in 2018...

Would you disagree that messages like "pull your finger out" not toxic and/or rude/offensive, to say the least? Out of where exactly? What is this implying? Regardless of whether it's considered "toxic" or not by the mod team, it's not nice and not really necessary.

"By the way, Evolution had better be here in 2018..." -- or what? This seems like a thinly veiled threat, but maybe this is ok/allowed. I'm not sure what the rules are exactly, but personally I like "be nice" to be a good guideline.

I'm just trying to say that there's a general attitude of negativity in many of these posts and that's not something that's nice to be around. I think that it would be difficult to disagree w/that at least, and hope you can understand my position.

 

[DeepBlue]

But your veiled threats to answer your questions or else you'll pull your investment are not cool. Divest yourself of it, if you want.

This was not a veiled threat. It was a statement of intent. Investors are taking their money out of DASH and that is causing the value of DASH to fall faster than other cryptos. We were 4th at one point now we are 14/15th position. I'm making people aware of some of the reasons this is happening. It seems you are not interested that the price of DASH decreases. In one way that is admirable but in another way it is not. Admirable because it is clear you are programming because you believe in a mission and will program regardless of DASH price. However it is not helpful in another way because it seems you may have not made the very real connection between the investments we make and the ability for your programming to actually help the people you're building the programs for.

Investors funding pays for all the core salaries, community projects and infrastructure that make DASH of value to the people. Each time investors pull their money out the DASH price decreases. I'm raising this for awareness that there is a desire to pull out from investing in DASH when there is uncertainty in an investor's mind and uncertainty happens when valid questions are not answered. No threats involved in that statement.

If you have questions about the engineering / tech, I'm happy to answer them. I'm also more happy to answer them when you ask without seething criticism or saying things like "pull your finger out". This forum has gotten toxic, and I don't like to hang around because of that. If everyone is nice it makes this a much better place to be.

In the past your comment on this point may have been true. I have also raised this issue myself that I was receiving backhanded slap downs, put downs and goading. However I have to say this has cleaned up considerably recently now the posts are moderated more carefully. I hear what you're saying about this but this is just one of a few sentences and they were written by people that are clearly feeling frustrated that genuine concerns are not being answered in a timely manner by core, or worse not answered at all.

I have been asking questions in the core team proposals for 6 months with very few answers. The community and MNOs are getting frustrated and concerned that our answers to legitimate questions are not being responded to.

TestCase management - Not entirely sure I understand your question. We build unit and integration tests into the repos, otherwise please clarify.
TestRun Management - Entirely sure I do not understand this question. (please clarify)
QA management - I will defer to our QA lead, and again, not entirely sure what you mean. "QA" is a big field.

TestCase management software enables the reusing of past TestCases. This can save large amounts of time designing, writing and building test cases again from scratch. You can find and reuse past test cases from past projects and the software enables the testers to manage and organize these test cases into a cohesive library so that they are easy to find and implement them in new testing jobs.

Test run management is software used to compile test cases together and run those test cases. It also records the results of the test runs and enables new bug reports to be issued directly from the test environment. This enables issues to be tracked from the source all the way through to resolution and ensure no bugs or issues get missed because the test run cannot be closed until all bugs and issues are resolved.

I have used TestTrack Pro by Seapine software that has a fully integrated development suite. It is built around the Agile process. The software includes issue and bug management, project management for scrum stories, and additional optional modules for test case management, requirements management, test run management TTpro also links into a variety of source code management software ensuring all areas of information and communication flow seamlessly, from management, coders and testers. It also takes the drudgery out of the documentation of your actions when coding, which means you spend more time coding and less time administering. Seapine also have their own source code management software (surround SCM) giving a fully seamless communication between all these different aspects of coding within the teams. A fully integrated software solution streamlines communications considerably and greatly increases productivity and traceability between all members of the dev team. The Agile scrum stories can be built and developed within the requirements management software itself. Seapine software have now been bought out by Helix software - however I'm not familiar with Helix's solution.

From your reply it looks like the core team are using a variety of different software solutions that are not integrated and I think this could lead to less that optimal communications between the different aspects of your coding environment, even if you have fully implemented Agile. If you have a fully integrated development suite and use GitHub as your SCM software then you will find that coding efficiency improves and communication issues also greatly improve.

I would suggest the core team managers spend some time assessing the software you are using and consider a fully integrated software suite. I would also recommend a software suite that has been designed to specifically support Agile. This way the administration of Agile becomes so much easier when there are tools specifically built into the software to implement it.

 

[DeepBlue]

Regardless of whether it's considered "toxic" or not by the mod team, it's not nice and not really necessary.

I agree with your feedback here. I wish to point out that I did not make that statement you disliked. Another member did.

One thing we have to do however is also put this into context. People can be nice only for so long, then it is only natural that people start to react out of being frustrated.

I have been asking questions from the core team for 6 months in their proposals. So far very few of my questions have been answered. I have been patient all of this time however I am feeling I am running out of patience and honestly feeling exacerbated. I am wondering how patient would the core like us to be?

If you find it difficult to appreciate what I'm saying imagine you ring one of those hotlines, that says please press 1 for sales, press 2 marketing, press 3 for business development, all the way to press 10 to hear these messages again etc. When you do that you are put through to another set of options, then another set up of options. Then they put you on hold for 45 minutes and finally the message says "thank you for your call" and cuts the line dead - no response to your questions. Now imagine running that through for 6 months with little to no response to your questions during this time. If you can imagine that then you can start to feel the frustration I am feeling by having my questions, concerns and issues not answered. Other community members have had similar experiences, that is when these comments leak out. Out of pure frustration.

To add to this I run an enterprise and have limited time to make these comments. I have however taken time out of my schedule to share my experience and to make comments. That takes time away from my ability to invest that time in my business. The reason I have done this is primarily I feel a strong desire and passion to help people in a dire situation like Venezuela. Because the problem in Venezuela is totally solvable with DASH. Software programming is not enough to solve the problem. We need everyone communicating and sharing their knowledge, experience and passion - and of course their investment to fund all this activity.

I have been consistently stonewalled for the past 6 months on the core proposals. It feels like my contributions are not appreciated. With white knight, MNOs stepping in to protect core sometimes I feel I am burning up my time in a hopeless situation. I would love MNOs to stop protecting core and start asking questions of their own. Contributing to the solution and maybe even consider my questions and ask are they valuable questions to ask? Would you like to know the answers to these questions? If they are good questions and a good contribution then maybe MNOs could start supporting me a little more often instead of cutting me down and trying to silence my contributions.

I make contributions made out of a genuine deep desire to help people with this financial crisis, just in the same way I know the core team programmers are not programming for money, but because you too believe in this mission. We should be working together if the contributions are constructive. And I believe my contributions, in the form of questions, support, feedback and sharing experience with proposal owners is of value. Coding is not enough. You need business people to implement your solution. You need finances to power that solution.

It is however disheartening to have my contributions stonewalled. It is akin to a core programmer working their hearts out to create code to solve the problem and having that code deleted and thrown in the trash can. How would you feel? How long would you want to keep going? Then you voice your opinion that you feel like giving up and then have someone say to you that sounds like a threat and you should just move on if you want.

 

[DeepBlue]

1. He wrote "30 development staff", not 30 full-time developers. That also includes scientists/researchers and technical writers in the engineering organization.

OK, but the information given by core funding proposal therefore is a little misleading in the way it was presented by grouping Development altogether in one group and not stating if they are part time or full time. Including scientists / researchers and technical writers in Development is misleading - they should be separated out.

How many full time coders actually writing code are there working on the code?
How many part time coders actually writing code?
How many other staff that are grouped with the 30 developers and could you state their role and if they are working full time or part time?

 

[DeepBlue]

2. You are only looking at one single public repo (the DashCore repo). We have many other public repos and we have private repos also.

3. The "private statistics" links you are referring to apply to individual user profiles, not organizations. Also, these do not show specifics, it just shows a graph (kinda like a histogram but with dots) with number of commits per day, and includes all public + private commits. That's it, it does not break down anything else, and it's only per-user.

However, I'd be happy to share commit statistics on a regular basis (say, monthly). I've been mulling this idea for months, since March / April time frame, then Alex started sharing the "What's Going On" reports and I didn't think of it for a while.

Thank you for this clarification.

Large scale financial investors in cryptographies will be using the GitHub repositories activity reports as one of their key primary signals as to how much development activity is involved with building the software. If they see very little coding activity they are likely to come to the incorrect conclusion that not much development work is taking place on a project and therefore it is not a project worth investing in.

In addition MNO's and community members and investors would appreciate Development activity statistics being made available on daily basis. It reassures the DASH community to see large amount of activity occurring rather than not seeing anything happening (or very little) If the activity data reporting is automated by making some setting changes for the private repositories I don't see any reason why this should not be set up? It would only have beneficial effects. It would provide the community with a more accurate reflection of the amount of Dev activity that is taking place and it would encourage investors to invest.

I would also recommend that all associated repositories for any DASH coding be identified and cross linked from any other description of the content of those repositories. In this way investors and community members would know where to find these repositories without having to specifically request them.

We need the DASH price to go up. Investment boosts the DASH price which means we will have more money to support and implement DASH funding for projects. The amount of Development activity is one of key signal indicators that large investors or Savvy investors use in order to determine if a coin is worth investing. It is minimal investment in the core's time to set this up. I am a little surprised that core management have not mentioned for the development to set this up yet?

 

[DeepBlue]

You're invested in Dash, not DCG. We are one single DAO funded company out of many. There are other ways of trying to increase the value of your investment. DCG cannot "retain" your investment. We don't see any of it. But your veiled threats to answer your questions or else you'll pull your investment are not cool. Divest yourself of it, if you want.

The money to fund DCG comes from the money investors put into DASH. Therefore DCG ought to perhaps give consideration more that our investment actually funds the DCG DAO via the DASH treasury. The DASH Treasury value in USD is directly related to the amount of investment made in DASH. Therefore I think you may be wise to consider who exactly is the source of your funds and it might be a good idea to consider if you can provide them with a little more information to feel confident in investing in DASH.

We are not investing in DCG - I don't understand this? Yes we are investing in DCG via the treasury funds. We also vote your proposals in. So actually yes we are investing in DASH by paying for services from the DCG . To say otherwise is perhaps not seeing yourself as part of the DASH network we are investing in? Could you please explain how we are not investing in DASH by paying for DCG programming services?

I guess you would work for free. Great, but it's not as good as earning a good wage - is it? Investors are looking to core for information in order to gauge how much money to invest. If DCG would realise that the investors look to see the activity of the DCG programmers and what they are doing. By providing this activity information it will greatly benefit the rest of the network and the other community projects. Therefore we are requesting that if DCG want projects to be funded they consider these factors and put at least a portion of your time giving this information for investors to see it is worthwhile investing in DASH. In this way you are supporting the source of your funds to get more funds. DCG is not an isolated unit of DASH.

You might want to be an isolated unit but you are not. You are major part of the DASH network and investors are looking to DCG for this information. If you can provide it you not only help yourself obtain funding you also help all the other hundreds of DASH community projects secure investment funding. This increases the DASH price which means we have more money in the treasury to support DCG and other community projects.

 

[kot]

@DeepBlue I really admire your engagement and time you have spent formulating your questions. I am assuring, they will be answered (I hope you were watching the call, as, I believe, many of your concerns were addresses during the call).

Please also pay attention to one thing - we can spend our time working or discussing on the forum, therefore I would really prefer shorter and more synthetic communication. I am simply unable to spend multiple hours a day just reading walls of text on the forum and responding to questions on daily basis. Therefore, there is no reason to complain multiple time about the same things - it won't help anyone.

PS. I went briefy respond to your (and others') proposition of changes in company structure, methods and tools. I will address these separately in broader communication, however I immediately can share my private opinions and feedback (don't take it as an official statement of the DCG):

• Who would be personally responsible (like we are with our names publicly available and legally liable for our decisions in company) if the proposed structure and headcount changes will cause collapse of the project (and I am sure it would end up like this with 30 engineers, one PM and one QA)? Who is taking responsibility for such micro-management? If we fail, we are taking responsibility and facing consequences. Who is responsible after micro-management done via populistic posts and voting system (which is not designed for such decisions btw)? Someone will simply write on the forum "I was wrong" and what's next?
• Some of the proposed solutions would work perfectly in centralised, corporate environment (I know it very well), however startups with distributed teams require different approach. Changes in delivery approach are happening - this is Agile adoption, I was talking about during the call. You seems to be a pro in IT business - you know that these king of changes are impossible to implement within a week or month.
• The day we are implementing a tool like screenshotmonitor.com would be my last day in Dash Core Group, as I believe in teamwork and personal engagement. I truly detest an idea of spying on our team members. We work and build this project for one great reason - freedom. You went waaay too far there.

 

[kot]

Dear All,

Please find the slide-deck from the Q2 call available in this location: https://dashpay.atlassian.net/wiki/...sh-Core-Group-Q2-2018-Summary-Call.pdf?api=v2

 

[Unstoppable]

The specific line of code is here: https://github.com/dashpay/dash/blo...6cb83890c579b1dc308a/src/privatesend.cpp#L256

(Note: If someone really wants to push for this, just open a PR to un-comment that line and see what happens -- you will get discussion from the Core devs / lead dev at the very least. No one at DCG is stopping anyone from taking action on this.)

Thank you @nmarley for answering my questions. As for the denomination suggestion, it sounds like it would only take a minute of your time to implement. Could you please do that on behalf of community? It would be another bullet point for you and Dash as a whole.

 

[Unstoppable]

@kot, more than anything else, we simply want some engagement and transparency from DCG. A quarterly presentation and a barely useful monthly report is not enough for the MNOs. So, thank you for engaging us here now.
I want to point it out it looks really bad when the quarterly presentation was cut off at the beginning of the community Q&A section. First, there's nearly no communication on the forums, and when you promise to answer community questions, the presentation is ended. Then, days later, we still don't have all the questions answered.

Take a look at it from our point of view. DCG has assured over and over they will improve transparency and communication with the community. Yet, here we are. Understand that some MNOs are getting a bit impatient. So, please continue to engage us here; not defensively, but constructively. The more transparent you are with us the more we can relax and have confidence in DCG again.

 

[Unstoppable]

Thanks @TaoOfSatoshi, I appreciate your mod team's support in this.



Would you disagree that messages like "pull your finger out" not toxic and/or rude/offensive, to say the least? Out of where exactly? What is this implying? Regardless of whether it's considered "toxic" or not by the mod team, it's not nice and not really necessary.

"By the way, Evolution had better be here in 2018..." -- or what? This seems like a thinly veiled threat, but maybe this is ok/allowed. I'm not sure what the rules are exactly, but personally I like "be nice" to be a good guideline.

I'm just trying to say that there's a general attitude of negativity in many of these posts and that's not something that's nice to be around. I think that it would be difficult to disagree w/that at least, and hope you can understand my position.

@nmarley, try to understand these are expressions of frustration, certainly not undeserved, and more than anything due to a lack of engagement from DCG. I'm thrilled that you are here now engaging with the community. Continue to converse with us, and MNO frustrations will ease.

It's certainly not the MNOs that have promised more community engagement and failed to do so. Try to see things from the MNO's perspective.

 

[nmarley]

TestCase management software enables the reusing of past TestCases. This can save large amounts of time designing, writing and building test cases again from scratch. You can find and reuse past test cases from past projects and the software enables the testers to manage and organize these test cases into a cohesive library so that they are easy to find and implement them in new testing jobs.

Test run management is software used to compile test cases together and run those test cases. It also records the results of the test runs and enables new bug reports to be issued directly from the test environment. This enables issues to be tracked from the source all the way through to resolution and ensure no bugs or issues get missed because the test run cannot be closed until all bugs and issues are resolved.

Ok, we have automated testing which has tests written into the software itself. This is usually what I think of when someone mentions "testing" -- we also integrate this into our CI such that commits and pull requests that fail the automated test suite aren't allowed to be merged. This is all under the "automated testing" umbrella.

What I think you are referring to here (and correct me if I'm wrong), is external testing by QA / Testers which is distinct and in which these external tests should be run -- do this and try and get this result, or do that and try and break the software. Some of this can be caught via automated testing also, and this would be preferable, as some of these tests can be written once, and they're in the code base forever.

Let me give an example: Insight (block explorer) search was broken for a few weeks. When I made a fix, I also added a test so that this regression won't happen again -- if the bug is re-introduced into the code, the test will catch it. Here's that example: https://github.com/dashevo/insight-api/commit/62d8cf390420c833db8cb0164b35c5e205ccc61e

From your reply it looks like the core team are using a variety of different software solutions that are not integrated and I think this could lead to less that optimal communications between the different aspects of your coding environment, even if you have fully implemented Agile. If you have a fully integrated development suite and use GitHub as your SCM software then you will find that coding efficiency improves and communication issues also greatly improve.

I would suggest the core team managers spend some time assessing the software you are using and consider a fully integrated software suite. I would also recommend a software suite that has been designed to specifically support Agile. This way the administration of Agile becomes so much easier when there are tools specifically built into the software to implement it.

A variety of products from different vendors does not necessarily mean that our environment is not integrated. GitHub integrates with many other things as you've hinted at. We have integrations from most of our repos to Travis CI, and from there, some of them go further. E.g. a few of our sites are auto-deployed when a certain branch is merged (e.g. our website is deployed in an automated fashion this way). We also have setup and are continuing to build out our own Jenkins deployment, which now allows us to have automated Gitian builds with every PR and even commit (not sure if that's finished or still a WIP right now, but actively being worked on if not done).

We're continuing to build our integrations and deployments as well. What I mean is, we are moving toward automated Docker image builds with every PR merge that will then push to a Docker registry, as well as build out our code coverage and metrics. I even have this as one of my upcoming initiatives, to standardize all repos and ensure consistent code coverage reporting, etc.

 

[nmarley]

@nmarley, try to understand these are expressions of frustration, certainly not undeserved, and more than anything due to a lack of engagement from DCG. I'm thrilled that you are here now engaging with the community. Continue to converse with us, and MNO frustrations will ease.

It's certainly not the MNOs that have promised more community engagement and failed to do so. Try to see things from the MNO's perspective.

Yes, I understand. I'm glad we're able to have discussions now. I don't think anyone on the team has ever not wanted to answer and communicate w/the community. But Robert also had a good point -- it can take up a fair bit of time, and we have to balance this and also doing our main work. I will continue to try and answer those questions which are within my purview, as time and workload allows. Like I said above, the shorter and more specific the question, the easier (and therefore quicker) I am able to answer.

At lot of the discussion reads like there is a separation between MNOs (also called investors) and DCG team. There are many MNOs who don't have a badge here or on DashCentral b/c they don't wish to be identified as such. And several of the DCG team are also MNOs. I can assure you those individuals have no intention of squandering their investment.

 

[TaoOfSatoshi]

Yes, I understand. I'm glad we're able to have discussions now. I don't think anyone on the team has ever not wanted to answer and communicate w/the community. But Robert also had a good point -- it can take up a fair bit of time, and we have to balance this and also doing our main work. I will continue to try and answer those questions which are within my purview, as time and workload allows. Like I said above, the shorter and more specific the question, the easier (and therefore quicker) I am able to answer.

At lot of the discussion reads like there is a separation between MNOs (also called investors) and DCG team. There are many MNOs who don't have a badge here or on DashCentral b/c they don't wish to be identified as such. And several of the DCG team are also MNOs. I can assure you those individuals have no intention of squandering their investment.

Here’s to a non-toxic forum!

 

[DeepBlue]

Please also pay attention to one thing - we can spend our time working or discussing on the forum, therefore I would really prefer shorter and more synthetic communication. I am simply unable to spend multiple hours a day just reading walls of text on the forum and responding to questions on daily basis. Therefore, there is no reason to complain multiple time about the same things - it won't help anyone.

I would be grateful if you saw my questions and comments as constructive feedback rather than "complaints" as you stated. If you read all my posts you will see there are only a few lines where I made a complaint that nobody was answering. The other several hundred lines in total where questions, comments and feedback. Therefore is it fair to represent my feedback as complaints?

The reason I posted in two locations (here and on core team compensation proposal) was because I was not receiving replies. If DCG could perhaps respond quicker then there would be no need to post in multiple places and we would all save time.

I truly detest an idea of spying on our team members. We work and build this project for one great reason - freedom. You went waaay too far there.

1. I would suggest a different choice of words. The word "spying" is not correct in this context. The definition of the word spying is to "gather information in secret about someone". This would not be the case. The Developers will know the software is installed therefore information gathering is not done in secret and therefore the word Spying is not the correct use of words here.

2. you are framing the use of this software in a most negative light. This software is there to assist remote staff not to hinder them. All my developers and remote staff use this software and they have no problems with it. In fact they actually prefer using it to not using it. The reason is when people are working remotely and they encounter issues and problems that lead to their work being delayed they want management to know that they are in fact working on it but it is just taking longer than expected. Seeing the stats in the software first hand is much more powerful than then them trying to explain themselves to people on the other side of the world why they are having issues and why there are delays we can see they are having issues and they feel assured that the wrong conclusions are not being made.

3. having this software enables us easily identify areas for improvements and make suggestions on their work. I have on occasions doubled an employees productivity by observing how they are working. If this undertaken over and extended period of time very large increases in productivity can be achieved by several factors. The staff that are proud of achieving and doing their work welcome constructive feedback like this. Slackers don't.

4. people that are working hard and are devoted to the cause have absolutely nothing to hide. They in fact want people to see the amount of work they are doing. I do not understand your response stating it is "limiting freedom". In what way is it limiting freedom?

What is wrong in ensuring that:

a) we can assist and support them with the additional information we have
b) we can ensure they are working optimally and see when they are having problems and issues.
c) our staff feel reassured we can see when they are having issues and are their to support them
d) they are working the full time they are contracted to work. We can weed out slackers at a glance.
e) The software also shows the amount of hours worked and produces an invoice at the end of the month. This saves a lot of administration time for us. If the coder works longer hours they also get more pay since we pay them on an hourly rate.
f) This also means high performing coders that are passionate and want to work longer hours get more money than coders that only doing 40 hours per week since we pay them on an hourly rate.
g) Screens out slackers in the intro interview: During the interview process I ask them if they have a problem with us using this software. If they come up with reasons for not using it then it tells me they either have not thought of the benefits of the software or they have something they want to hide. I do not hire codes that are not willing to have this software installed and in so doing I always ensure top coders work on my projects.

I really do not see any problem whatsoever with that. You say it is limiting freedom how exactly is it limiting freedom?

5. I use the software with the intention to primarily to support my staff. If you were working in an office with other people someone could just as easily take a look at the work you are doing. Would you also label them as spies and say they are limiting your freedom? In fact in the office space often people request managers to take a look at their work. I don't see anything different from setting this software up so we can support our remote staff and having a traditional office set up. If you do then can you inform me exactly why?

I am surprised that you have expressed such a negative view on using this software. I have only used it to support my staff who are working remotely and the true performers have absolutely no problem using it because they know I'm using it to support them. If you have a dispersed team this type of software is essential to gather important information to help assist remote developers work more efficiently.

I have watched the entire core call from start to finish. There are still unanswered questions.

You say you cannot spend hours at the forums answering questions. Well neither can I. I run a company and they need me. So I have to get up a 5:30am to make the time to do these posts. I clear my main tasks then I make these posts. You are not needing to do this all the time. DCG just need to answer questions when there are the quarterly calls and when there are funding requests.

I have heard your request and will aim to keep my posts a short as possible. However we are investing $935,000 USD dollars DCG this month. That is A LOT of money.

I think that spending a few hours answering investors questions is worthwhile and reasonable use of time to obtain that amount of the network's money so that we can ensure it is being well spent. Would you not agree?

 

[kot]

@DeepBlue ,
I'm a simple and straightforward person, so I prefer simple and straightforward communication. Some of your posts contain constructive feedback and I really appreciate them and will consider suggested changes and evaluate some of them. There is a part of your posts that are repeatable complains and I am not going to pretend that they aren't.

I also stand by my opinion about screenshotmonitor.com. I respect your point of view, however I strongly disagree and have the opposite view. You can use this software at your workplace - it is your choice. However at this point in time, there is no force on this planet that would make me spying on my teammates and friends.
I would hate an idea of having such software on my computer (no matter how many great words you would use to describe it) and I am not going to force any of my team members to accept that. We don't intend to hire slaves to work and look at their hands. We want enthusiasts, who would work with us because they want to and they believe in what they are doing - such person doesn't require constant monitoring. If I would have to watch monitors of my teammates, it would mean to me that I have failed as a manager and as a person.

I have heard your request and will aim to keep my posts a short as possible.

Well... That wasn't short at all

 

[AshFrancis]

After the situation with Ogilvy and T+C logos, can core please start sharing UX work via Invision - I've seen you use this internally, why not share these to the public? As a designer a fair while ago now, I know all the issues with 'too many chefs' but we really don't want to go too far down the line design wise without feedback and it may help to communicate with the DAO visually.

Further to this, Fernando has mentioned the new website will be by Kisslabs (https://www.kisslabs.ch/en/) - this is concerning from a UX perspective. Please can you share some more on this.