linaro-project-management team mailing list archive

[Michael Hope <michael.hope@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Joey Stanford <joey@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi TLs and PMs,
>
> As we think through the delivery of monthly milestones and their
> affect on status.linaro.org it's become very apparent that WIs should
> /not/ span months. Instead they should exist on a BP you intend to
> deliver in one month.  If you have a piece of work that will span
> multiple months then it should be multiple BPs (i.e. one BP per month,
> not two months working on one BP).  If you think you'll span months,
> please split the work into (minimally) one month chunks as BPs.
>
> This allows us to use the LP milestone view and not spend time
> updating status.l.o with essentially duplicate functionality. It also
> allows us to spend more time improving the "card view" (Roadmap item
> completion).  Additionally it allows us to better communicate
> success/failure to the TSC (we're delivering something that someone
> could attempt to use vs some obscure subset of WIs).   And lastly,
> it's just plain easier for you to manage a single BP per month than
> WIs from several BPs spanned across multiple months.

What's the driver behind this?  I'm concerned we're working around
limitations in the tools and losing information along the way.

Say I have a feature that will span months.  At the moment I have one
blueprint that tracks that feature with clumps of work items that go
against the months.  The work items are small and much less than a
month so, if I'm ahead of schedule, it's easy to pull in extra work
for this month by shifting lines on the whiteboard.

This feature == blueprint is easy to find and share.

The alternative is splitting the feature into many blueprints and
adding them as dependencies.  The current Launchpad UI makes ordering
these hard, duplicates lots of information, and makes it hard for a
Roger-like person to understand what's involved.  As blueprints are
roughly a month, then you risk being 90 % done but missing the
milestone, and can't easily pull in work from next month.

-- Michael