[Pulp-dev] Roadmap Challenges

[Robin Chan]

Brian,

To bring this back to your original question, here are some comments in
line.

Agree w/#1 - I have observed a few different ways that this problems has
been solved by developers. The requirement here is "I need a way to
understand all the work and deliverables associated with a feature." This
question comes down to how do we track of deliverables. This is I think
secondary and not as much of a problem as the next question.

#2 - This is essentially a question of planning deliverables. Your
descriptions is "how will someone know if a feature is committed to"? I
think full planning is not necessary for commitment. I believe that "full
planning" part could go in #1 in terms of tracking status. I think the
question is actually "how will someone know if a feature is committed to
and when it is committed by" - addition of a time or time frame.

In my experience, feature work generally went like this:
1. Define feature/problem to be solved.
2. Investigate:
    - refine requirements/problem definition
    - do enough design or planning of tasks to come up with estimate of work
3. Commit to work or not
4. execute along list of tasks, refine list as you learn.

Steps 1-3 is part of roadmap planning (higher level planning) and #3-4 is
sprint planning.


I think the problem with using the sprint field as we have used it, is that
if you add something to a sprint, the Scrum definition would lead people to
assume that the team is committing to it at the end of a defined sprint
period. We do not. This major departure from industry standard does not
serve us well in my opinion. We have kept items on sprints for many months
and then removed it. Even if we were able to convince folks that our
definition of sprint was "our next few sprints" of work, we don't have any
accountability that we are actually keeping our commitment here and the
folks wanting something on the sprint don't have any idea if something
added to a sprint will be there in 3 weeks or 12 weeks. I think others in
software are reasonable in understanding that software deliveries aren't
going to be there until they are, but I think our immediate focus on what
is in process (impending delivery/next build) and on some of the larger
deliveries.

Robin

On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 3:13 PM, Brian Bouterse <bbouters at redhat.com> wrote:

> I want to start a discussion around how Pulp does roadmap planning and
> some of our current challenges. This is the pre-discussion part of a future
> PUP. I want to collaborate on characterizing the problems first before we
> discuss solutions.
>
> # The surface problem statement
>
> It very difficult for external stakeholders to answer some simple
> questions about any given feature:
>
> * How would a user use this feature exactly?
> * Is it completed? If not, how much is left to do?
> * Which release is this going in?
> * Has this feature been fully planned and accepted as a committed to piece
> of work?
>
> # deeper problems
>
> I believe there are two deeper problems contributing to the problem above.
>
> 1. Any given feature is typically spread across multiple Redmine tickets.
> There may be the first implementation, followup changes, adjustments,
> bugfixes, reworks, docs followups, etc. This makes it practically hard to
> have the information necessary to answer the first 3 questions ^.
>
> 2. Devs of core or a plugin have no clear way to clearly signal that a
> feature has been fully planned and is committed to. The 'sprint' field has
> been used heretofore, but the recent feedback suggests that mechanism may
> not be the best way to indicate that work has been fully planned and
> accepted. We need a clear way to answer the last question ^.
>
> Do you agree or disagree with these problem statements? Do you have
> anything to add about the problem statements?
>
> Thanks!
> Brian
>
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