2010-03-02 Tuesday Meeting
Agenda
Note: This meeting is at 16:00 GMT due to some teaching commitments in Dundee.
Remember: Agenda must be complete (with estimated times) on the day before the meeting. Any additions after that must go at the bottom (AOCB)
Accepting minutes from last meeting
Matters Arising (<10 mins)
- Minimal specification email
Using Agilo - Best Practices (45 mins)
AOCB (<5 mins)
- What's a Product Owner?? (2mins)
Notes
In Attendance: Brian, Josh, Ola, Donald, Chris, Will, Andrew, Scott, Colin, Jason, Melsisa, Brian Jones, Curtis
Agilo
- Open questions & best practices / workflow
-
Adding a story
- Product Manager is not actively managing the ticket backlog because of our system. Finding tickets in the sea of tickets can be a pain.
- With vanilla setup, stories are going into the backlog
- Gets lost very quickly
-
Currently cannot assign stories to a milestone (this is a problem)
- To address this we have added a 'milestone' dropdown to the new story form
-
Standard agilo workflow:
- Start milestone
- Add requirements to milestones
- Add new stories to milestone
- ....
-
svn integration
- strictness: disabled as decided last week
-
only restriction: cannot close other people's tickets
- should be able to do most everything else such as comment, etc
- new SVN command words automatically will pick up actions for commit (see presentation for the list of commands). * BEWARE: entering svn comment "still need to fix #1234" will CLOSE #1234!!!
-
ticket ownership
- @Chris changes agilo to have all initial tickets unowned (not by Josh)
- Tickets should not be restricted when assigning (can add them without assigning them for example).
- Whiteboard can not be customized to show ticket sub views (by user for example).
-
Collapsed Whiteboard (issues and quirks)
-
Closed stories & bugs do not disappear from the whiteboard! Agilo guys know this.
- Solution: We should treat all 'bugs' as 'tasks' instead (which can be managed easier).
- Josh: usually you would have fewer stories in a single sprint
-
bug-as-container is a large complaint from many with Agilo
- @For now we put bugs as tasks.
- Will: naming convention? " Bug : ... "
- Limited space for bug titles (about 3 words).
- Color coding is broken
- Time remaining only shows in tasks and only show as 'H' for hours (even though its days).
- Do reorder the whiteboard, you need to recorder the backlogs. Items at the top show up at the top of the whiteboard.
-
priorities
- Possibly use story points next sprint?
- There's also "business value", "importance", ...
-
Closed stories & bugs do not disappear from the whiteboard! Agilo guys know this.
-
Breaking down a work plan
- Where does everything go so we are all doing it the same way?
- Requirements don't show up in whiteboard (whiteboard for devs, reqs for PO)
-
Do we want to keep 3 levels of hierarchy? (Requirements -> Stories -> Tasks)
- Right now requirements are not well developed in the Agilo UI. * Chris: not sure we want to use them. * Josh: I am for using requirements (as the work plan pages), without it we don't have much of a hierarchy. * Ola: If we removed requirements, what would Agilo look like. Likes Josh's idea. * Chris: Lets try to replace work plan with requirements page on a few work plans and see how it works.
- Whether or not intertrac linkages work???
-
In progress
- The middle swimlane in the whiteboard
- "tickets that are assigned", but what does that mean for us?
- Andrew: "I've started doing some work on this, and I'm not blocked"
-
Donald: "My current ticket" all the rest get moved back
- Josh: benefit is that someone can come and take one of the tickets
- Benefit of not moving them back is seeing what all someone is working on.
- Jason: "Seeing someone blocked on 7 tickets is something good to know"
- Andrew: "Blocked means you can'
-
Josh: stressful trying to keep only one ticket
- Will just have to ask "what ticket are you on now?"
- also generates a lot of emails.
-
Notifications
- Andrew: Why do I get emails about everything? Way it works.
-
Estimating v. timings
- Try to get into habit of putting in estimates
- Put days estimates, and then reduce it as you work on the ticket
- Donald: initial estimate saved? Would be nice to have it more clearly visualized.
- Scott: "Get to a task and you don't need to finish it, assign to a new requirement?" Sure.
-
QA integration
- creating "defects", "comments" becomes "defects", too.
- What's the proper place to put the QA requirements?
- @Ola will create a QA story. (and will send an email)
-
Sprints are renamed.
- On Thursday, we will plan the next one.
- Try to reduce the dependency on the graffle
- Scott: Requirement for scrum-mastery?...
-
General feelings?
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Andrew: use this for iterations to release of 4.2? (put off merging tracs)
- Chris: probably, yes. Would like to avoid doing any more wrangling.
- Where do XML tickets go? Remake them on the server trac?
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Andrew: use this for iterations to release of 4.2? (put off merging tracs)
-
Outstanding
- @Chris enables commit messages
- @Chris modifies user lookups
Product Owner/Jason
- Was addressing last week the definition of "PO"
- Product owner is a full-time job
- Didn't mean to minimize involvement
- Can decide later if we need such a role
-
Chris: can have extra team members, but we need to reduce their hours
- otherwise skews the numbers
-
should Jason's task be put in a tasks?
- Scott: certainly valuable
Minimal spec
- The problem with the current minimum spec is that its too minimal.
- Primarily for commercial providers, who typically have rich file formats
- Having another spec, "Recommend" or "Compliant" (e.g. emission wavelengths for each channel)
- "Let you use the logo"
Action Items
- Chris: change agilo to have all initial tickets 'unowned' (not by Josh).
-
Everyone: use 'tasks' instead of 'bugs' in Agilo
- When creating a 'bug task' prefex the title with 'BUG:'
- Ola & Will: Try a few work plan / requirement pages. Try crosslinking between omero and shoola tracs
- Everyone: take a look at QA/Agilo integration and make some suggestions on how to get it working well.
- Ola: will create a QA story for everyone to comment on.
- Chris: enabled commit messages in Agilo and modify user lookups
- Everyone: ON THURSDAY plan our next sprint.