[maemo-community] Sprint meeting & process

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 22:09, Niels Breet<niels at maemo.org> wrote:
>
> So, what I get from this is:
>
> 1. The council doesn't see enough progress on tasks
> 2. You want better visibility of work being done

Well, here the council is representing the community - not individual
responses. But under those two points, yes - basically.

> The question is, are you not satisfied about the work being done? Or not
> satisfied about the visibility?

The fundamental problem is that tasks are being committed to, and that
the status in the sprint meeting doesn't correspond to the status on
the wiki page which doesn't correspond to the status updates received
before then.

Lots of pertinent points on managing expectations here:

    http://randaclay.com/how-to/want-to-be-successful-learn-to-manage-expectations/

The fact that the status updates are buried - with little visibility
to anyone not actively polling it - on the bottom of a wiki page is
incidental.

> Would that be more helpful for you? There are sometimes things I do in my
> day to day work that are the boring maintenance work or might be a bit
> sensitive. What to do in those cases?
>
> What should I report when I added 3 feeds to the planet, accepted some
> garage projects or helped somebody setting up his git repository? Is that
> really interesting info?

No, that's BAU (business-as-usual). The only time I'd really expect
BAU stuff to show up in status reports is if it's along the lines of
"server's have broken, backups are gone and we've got no website:
stopped worked on $TASK and it's now not going to get done".

The status reporting isn't to check that day-to-day roles and
responsibilities are being done (IMHO), it's to ensure:

  * that people are aware whether or not the specific
project-oriented, time-limited
    tasks that have been committed to by the task owner are going to
be completed
    on time, and to the spec agreed by *everyone* involved in the
planning process
    (this is supposed to be agile & collaborative - ideally the
priorities would be
    set by us as a group, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves)

  * that the details of a task which emerge during its execution are
communicated
    between interested parties, and that knowledge and expertise can
be shared to
    improve the final deliverable.

HTH,

Andrew

PS. Tried desperately hard to avoid going into consultant mode and
using the word
    "leverage" in that final point ;-)

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