development cycle planning

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hello plasmaters! :)

Tokamak 5 is drawing to a close here and one of the big results is working 
towards both a more useful git workflow[1] and some project management tools.

for the next three months the core team is going to be trying out a new tool: 
iceScrum[2], which is a web-based scrum[3] management tool.

note that as a plasma contributor, you are not required to use iceScrum. you 
are, however, invited and encouraged to do so as it should help us all be 
better at what we're already doing. we want to keep the overhead very low, 
particularly for contributors (as opposed to those of us doing the scrum 
management).

for core team planning and devel, we will be striving to use it as much as 
possible. also, we almost certainly won't get it "right" the first time 
around, but that's part of the learning and improvement process. :)

the plan is this:

timing:

* we are starting with development cycles, aka "sprints", of ~1 month

* three of these sprints will make a release cycle, which puts our first 
release cycle conveniently around the time of the 4.7 release

* we are not holding the release cycles to the freezes of the KDE SC schedule; 
during SC freezes, new work will simply happen in branches (or with the new 
git workflow in the integration repository)

sprint structure:

* we have features, which are "high level" user benefits, in iceScrum; an 
example might be "Handling of popups in the Plasma Active shell panel" or 
"libplasma2 Package class refactoring"

* these features are then broken down into "stories" which are specific 
aspects of the feature

* stories are scheduled for each sprint, and once the sprint is "open" each 
story can have tasks assigned to it. these tasks should be "bite size" steps 
towards implementing the story. a good rule of thumb is "something that can be 
done in under 4 hours"

* as a sprint progresses, people claim the tasks and move them from "Waiting" 
to "In progress" to "Done". when all the tasks for a story is done, the story 
is completed. when all the stories in a feature are complete, then a feature 
is completed.

this will help us know much better what each other is working on (more 
important as we expand into things like Plasma Active where we have a lot of 
cross-project coordination to do), plan for the future and know how we are 
progressing.

to use our iceScrum install, go to:

	http://contour-scrum.basyskom.org/icescrum/

click on the "Connect" button in the top right, then on "Registration" and set 
up an account for yourself. no, it isn't integrated with identity.kde.org. if 
this experiment works out then we'll work on such things (and pull the 
existing data over to the new install). to make that possible (more easily), 
*please* use the same login name you use on identity.kde.org for you account 
in iceScrum. this will make a future migration painless.

once you've created your account, let me know (by email, irc, whatever) and i 
will add you to the "Plasmaters" team and the "Plasma" project.

you can then start adding features and stories to the Sandbox, and Marco, 
Kevin and/or myself (the "scrum masters") will triage them into the product 
backlog (which is where features/stories wait for scheduling).  

at the start of each sprint, we will have 3 days where we will discuss what 
each of us would like to have scheduled for that sprint and the scrum mastesr 
will move things around to reflect the results.

if things come up during the sprint period (innevitable :) then we can also 
add things as needed in response to requests / threads on the mailing list 
here.

let's go! :)

questions, thoughts, concerns, ideas?

[1] i won't go into the proposed git workflow in this email, but you can see a 
draft of the process here:

http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Git/Feature_Development_Workflow

[2] http://www.icescrum.org/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28development%29

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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