DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014: Managing Complexity

Speakers: Crell
Drupal 8 is big. Really big. The code base is much cleaner and more maintainable than in previous versions, but it's still big. And big complex code bases are hard to manage.

We're going to have to manage this system for some time, though; not just for Drupal 8, but in the future Drupal 9 and beyond. How can we ensure that the core team scales? Not just committers, but our social architecture itself?

There are a couple of things we can do, both technical and social, drawing on the experience of other large projects. This session will lay out the problem space of maintaining a big system, then offer some suggestions for how to manage complexity going forward (including how to reduce it).

This talk will cover both Drupal 8's maintenance lifecycle, as well as ways to plan ahead for Drupal 9.

Resources:

Simple Made Easy, Rich Hickey, author of Clojure
Stomp Complexity, Sam Boyer
Norris Numbers
The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Jo Freeman
The Ethics of Unpaid Labor, Ashe Dryden
Twitter conversation from Webchick
How to grow your open source project
Keeping it simple, Sam Boyer
The Danger of Having no Why, Emma Jane Wesby

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