Did you know there is a Team Forum? Well there is, with lots of sub forums to discuss all the various aspects of running a huge Project like MediaPortal. And you know what? It is a lot like the User Forums! There are tons of discussions going on all the time, with many different points of view, all exchanged freely and openly, but with a lot of support and respect, just like the User Forums! 

On top of that, there are several IRC Channels, and you should see the traffic! There are multiple chats running 24x7: testers comparing notes, developers checking fixes or posting the latest fix to SVN, admins solving website issues and working on the new website. Talk about communication, our Team members are frequently in the midst of several chats at once, plus working on MP, plus answering user questions in the forums, plus responding to the many issues that arise daily and are posted for feedback by our indefatigable Project Coordinator. Sounds like a huge corporation? Well it’s only about 40 really hard working, brilliant, dedicated guys who, in the midst of it all, have a really great time.

Whether you are a C# or C++ expert, a writer, web designer, graphics designer, PR professional, convention organizer or web developer, you have something to offer. If you like dynamic, creative team spirit and want to help create the best media center software ever, take on Microsoft and rule the world, read on!

Here is The Inside Scoop Vol 1.3 with our Project Coordinator: Christian aka infinite.loop on Our MP Team - The Fuel of MediaPortal

Our MP Team - The Fuel of MediaPortal

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1. How do you get to be a member of the MP Team?

All our current team members and developers were "just" users of MediaPortal when they first came to the Project. Some of them were professional software developers; some started to learn coding just to be able to improve MediaPortal. Some contributed patches to fix issues, others started to work on a community plugin. 

It is the interest and dedication that attracts the attention of the Team members, who then keep an eye on this person. If their code is of good quality, and the communication between the developers of the team and the community developer is good, then the chances are very high that they will get invited to join the Development team. 

It is pretty much the same for all the other teams as well. If someone shows a true dedication for the project and team spirit, then they will get an invite. 

2. How many team groups are there and how many members in each group?
Actually we consider all our users to be part of the team, so I would have to say over 75,000 . Certainly our active Forum Members are a vital component of the Team, especially by helping support other users and submitting good bug reports. We are very proud of the advanced skills, passion, dedication and helpfulness of our users. I think we have one of the best user groups and forums in the world. Of course, we need a core Team to coordinate all the input and translate that into the software. It’s not easy to keep up with our users!

Officially, we have six Team Groups, or Departments: Development, Design, Documentation, Test/Quality Assurance, Forum Moderators, Administrators and Management. However, we really function as one Team.  The number of members in each group is not that defined because each group has members who are very dedicated and spend a lot of their spare time on MediaPortal, while there are other, very valuable members who do not have so much time but still help out whenever they can. Also, some team members help out in more than one area. 

3. What training or support is there for new Team members?
After the team agrees on inviting a new person to the team, I usually send them an invitation and ask if they are interested to join the team. If they are, then I set them up with the account permissions they need for their work activities. After that, I explain the team’s basic work flow, our tool set (we have some nice ones) and who is responsible for what - in other words, whom to contact in case of questions. Until the new member settles in, I try to help them get used to everything and answer their questions. Every team member also helps, so usually they find their way into the team very fast.

4. What skills are required?
Generally speaking, you must be a team player. This means that you have to be able to work with the other team members, and respect the rules and guidelines of the team. Communication is the key component in our team. We talk a lot about possible ways to solve issues, how to design new features, and so on. But developers also need to be able to write high quality code and document their work. 

5. What are the ‘Rules and Guidelines’ of the team?
They explain the general work flow. If a developer introduces a new feature, he first has to propose this in the team forums, where the proposal can be discussed. This discussion is not only about "should it be done", but also "how would it be done best". 

If the team agrees that this new feature should get into the next version of MediaPortal, then the developer creates a new task in our Project Management Software, Mantis. As soon as the developer finishes his work, he posts the code changes and a test binary in the team forums, because we require it be tested, and confirmed to be working, without breaking anything else, before it is committed to SVN. 

The procedure is similar for bug fixes and reworks. The guideline also says that during a feature freeze, no one is allowed to introduce new features. 

As you can see, there is a pretty long list of rules because it describes the entire development work flow. 

6. How many Developers are there?
Currently we have about five developers who are truly dedicated to working on MP 1. Albert is working on MP 2, and Morhpeus_xx has started to help him there as well. There are about ten more developers who do not have much spare time currently, but still try to help out where they can. 

7. How many Community Developers are there?
A lot! There are about ten community developers who are very active. They are mainly the developers of the most popular community plugins. There are also many other developers in the community who provide patches for bugs, or work on some smaller tools and plugins. Others are creating really astonishing community skins as I am sure everyone knows. 

8. What is the role of the Design Team? Does it deal only with Skin Design or overall design and user interface?
The Design team was always intended to work on our main skin as well as provide graphics for all sorts of other projects like the homepage, articles, promotion material and so on. However, during the last few years, the head count of the Design team decreased dramatically because the previous members simply did not have that much spare time any more to work on MediaPortal. We tried to invite Designers from the community, but they were unable to join because the work on their community skin(s) already requires all their spare time.

Luckily, we have Harley! He does a great job on our default MediaPortal 1 skin, pretty much on his own, and still manages to create other awesome skins for us all as well, like Project Mayhem, XFace and his latest skin, Fidelity.

Now, MediaPortal 2 is coming along in development, so we need to restructure parts of our team. We want to create a breathtaking default skin for MP 2, which will also act as a template for community skinners to work from. What we need for that are skilled graphic artists, people who design new UI concepts, and "coders" for necessary implementation.

At first glance, it looks like skinning for MediaPortal 2 would be extremely complex, because it uses an entirely different concept, but it is not. The idea behind such an approach is that you have specialists for usability, design and implementation. With such an approach, you will end up with a skin which looks stunning, handles perfectly and is very intuitive. Plus it is built with a clean and stable skin code. Albert will be talking about the new Skin Engine more as it progresses.

While we do have artists and coders in our team, we still need a person who is dedicated and skilled to approach the basic UI design concept which one of our former team members started. He made good progress, but at present does not have the time to continue it.

9. How does the Team decide which community patches to include?
This decision is 100% up to the Development team. First they take a look at the code quality. There are two ways to achieve something in code: the quick way (also referred to as hack) and the right way. Obviously we are only interested in the latter. 

If the code quality is good, then the next question is regarding the purpose of the patch. It can be a bug fix, a usability change or a new feature. 

If we are currently in the last phase of development for a new release, then there are several restrictions. New features are not allowed to be added, nor are big reworks. The reason is that both pose big risks for stability. In such a case, the patch would get postponed to be added for the next release. 

There are also cases where the code quality is good, and we are not in the last phase of development, yet the patch gets rejected. In such cases, our developers always explain to the submitter very well why this is done. The reasons can be very different. For example, we must ensure that MediaPortal is usable for everyone. Sometimes a patch would change the usability of an area so that it would be great for one group of users, but make it unusable for others. Or the change might break any currently available community skins or plugins, and so on. 

For many patches there are discussion threads in the team forums which are many pages long. So I can assure everyone that we do not reject any patch easily. 

10. What skills or new Team Members are you currently looking for to enhance the Team?
We always need help in every area, from Direct Show to C++ guru, or tester to documentation writer. Just offer to help any Team member, even with a specific task or activity. If your work is good, and you work well with the Team, you will surely get invited to join. 

I think what shocked me most about this interview was that we currently have only five developers fully dedicated to MP 1 and only two to MP 2. How many does Microsoft have? Yet, often MediaPortal is compared very favorably to Windows Media Center, even 7MC. It’s really a David and Goliath story in the making isn’t it? I’ll say one thing, we sure have balls!