linaro-project-management team mailing list archive

[Joey Stanford <joey.stanford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Vicky et al,

Something to consider further, redmine + taskboards


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Zygmunt Krynicki <zygmunt.krynicki@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, May 24, 2011 at 4:14 PM
Subject: Re: The need for more verbose work item updates
To: James Westby <james.westby@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Dave Martin <dave.martin@xxxxxxxxxx>, linaro-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


W dniu 24.05.2011 20:55, James Westby pisze:
>
> On Tue, 24 May 2011 18:36:18 +0100, Dave Martin<dave.martin@xxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
>>
>> It really feels like it could be time to promote the work items
>> to a real entity in launchpad.  Has this been discussed before?
>
> Many times.
>
> It's not something that the Launchpad team is likely to work on at all
> this year, even if there was consensus on what should be done.

And this is why we should not keep being stuck with Launchpad.

> The Infastructure team could work on it, if it is high enough priority,
> but it doesn't seem to me that we have reached that point yet.
>
> A better solution may be to stop using the whiteboards and just have
> everyone manipulate status.linaro.org directly. That's a fair chunk of
> work itself though, and again it needs to be high enough priority to
> beat out other things.

Or we could just deploy Redmine and wait, less painfully, till
Launchpad becomes a better productivity suite for teams of developers
that are NOT working on a distribution.

> In addition, I'm wary of adding lots of extra features to workitems, as
> I feel they tend to be symptomatic of trying to load up engineers with
> too much process. We should always be careful to balance the desire for
> more information with the overhead that it causes. You can say that the
> features are optional, but having them there will always push people
> towards using them.

While I agree with you completely about not throwing too much process
at developers I need to stress not having a first-class work item
"object" means we have no real tool, just a gimmick.

We should absolutely have work item history, we should also be allowed
to "grow" from a simple one-line work item to something more
resembling real tasks, with comments, code references, rich state
changes, full history and participation of any number of people.

I know I'm biased here but Redmine provided all of that one year ago
when we started and it still does today. Let's use it! It has all the
right APIs for talking to status.linaro.org so we could retain our
custom tools.

(shameless advertisement below)

If anyone is interested in Redmine (or just heard of it now) feel free
to access my personal instance at http://fracture.suxx.pl/. In
particular I would encourage *everyone* to look at my work item
"rooster" at: http://fracture.suxx.pl/rb/taskboards/11

Each item there is a full-fledged task with all the features of a
"launchpad bug" and more. I can just drag them around to indicate I'm
done working on something. I can click on the task number to access
the full rich state. If anyone is interested in _experimenting_ with
this feel free to sign-in with your launchpad and either start a new
project or ping me for being added to a group to work on validation
projects).

Note: Redmine is not perfect by any means but it's hands down _better_
at solving blueprints + work items than Launchpad ever was.

Best regards
Zygmunt Krynicki.

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