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)

1. Accepting minutes from last meeting

2. Matters Arising (<10 mins)

   • Minimal specification email

3. Using Agilo - Best Practices (45 mins)

   • Top-level developer links: email
   • workplan pages as requirements ticket: email
   • milestones as releases: email

4. 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", ...
  • 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?
    • 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?
  • 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.