[maemo-community] Sprint meeting & process

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 14:33, Dave Neary<dneary at maemo.org> wrote:
>
> Andrew Flegg wrote:
>>
>> Date:    Thursday, 18th June 2009; 13:30 UTC
>
> Unfortunately, at this short notice I will not be available tomorrow -
> I've already committed to something out of the office.

Apologies for the short notice.

> I can give progress on my tasks from last month, and also describe what
> I expect to be my top priorities for the coming month, in this email,
> though.

Thanks.

>> Proposed sprint process:
>>    * Pre-meeting distribution of final task statuses, along with
>>      whether it is complete.
>
> Who will do this? It seems like a cumbersome issue for the person that
> does it, when it is more or less a copy & paste of part of the wiki page
> with "what's holding you up?"

Well, you've just done it above, so it's not that onerous. I've also
seen circumstances where the sprint meeting starts with "oh, yes,
that's finished" when going through a task which is listed at 0% on
the wiki page.

The existing process is broken. *Something* needs to change. I don't
trust the wiki to accurately reflect any particular task's status at
any time.

>>    * Fixed meeting date: first Tuesday of the calendar month at
>>      13:30 UTC. The next meeting will be on Tuesday, 1st July.
>
> Seems like a good idea. But that only gives us 2 weeks for this sprint.
> So even the SHOULD tasks have to be small this time.

Yup. We could put in an exception for this sprint (two sprints of 3
weeks) but that diminishes the impact of *knowing* when the sprint'll
be.

> I can see your point - make it easy for people to send status updates
> and ensure that status updates sent in one place are visible everywhere
> they should be. But this seems to me like it will make people less
> likely to send updates, rather than more likely.

Fair enough. Combined with Niels' objections, they seem reasonable.
Any alternative suggestion? If the workflow of Open -> In progress ->
Complete/Closed is OK (in the wiki), it's likely it'd be replaced with
a little workflow system a la Stskeeps' one for Mer.

That could also include a micro-blogging/quick task update UI. But how
do we ensure that people _are_ going in to update them on a daily
basis? By being pushed out on maemo-community, it acts as a reminder
to send your own updates.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
Maemo Community Council chair