linaro-project-management team mailing list archive

[Amit Kucheria <amit.kucheria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Ilias Biris <ilias.biris@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi folks
>
> http://status.linaro.org/lane/2012I3.html
>
> status.l.o is working once again thanks to the excellent effort from
> Loic and Danilo (thanks folks!). Before asking you to link blueprints to
> cards I would like to raise the question whether we want to maintain
> status.l.o for future use.
>
> - Do you want to use s.l.o? [Y/N]

I've always thought of s.l.o as the management view of the project.
I've had no real use for it. After having experimented with and
abandoning monthly blueprints I found it even less useful since the
burndown charts aren't too useful.

> - If yes, are your teams committed to link blueprints to cards and keep
> updating BPs as needed in order to show progress top-down? [Y/N]

We try. And most of our blueprints are more or less up to date and
linked to cards[1]. But I can't commit to updating it more than once a
month. Also, I have not been asked by anybody from our member
companies about these.

As stated elsewhere, getting blueprints updated requires gentle
persuasion followed by gentle threats. :) And they don't always work.
And sometimes there are just more important things to do, like landing
a feature into the kernel merge window. So several blueprints are
updated long after-the-fact.

Having said that, I find blueprints useful to assign work to
engineers. When I want new work started, I create a blueprint, add a
description of the work and assign it to the engineer for R&D. After a
few weeks of nagging, it usually gets populated with useful
information - work items, extended descriptions, upstream status, etc.

Since engineers report weekly status in several forms (1:1, weekly
meetings, weekly status reports) there is a lot of redundancy built
into the reporting. Which is OK. If I could, however, tell engineers
that they just need to update their blueprints and the following would
_automatically_ happen, there would be a lot more compliance.
  - weekly status reports would be extracted from it
  - weekly meeting agendas wouldn't require the round table where
everyone repeats what they just typed out in the weekly reports
  - In our 1:1s, we could annotate the auto-generated weekly report to
add highlights, etc.
  - These annotated reports would be used to generate every other kind
of report - monthly executive reports, release highlights, etc.

However, I won't be the one writing these tools, so its easy for me to
have Utopian visions. :)

> If you answered yes in the questions above, then see [1] on how to link
> BPs to cards. Otherwise please share your reservations/concerns and
> suggestions. Given that the service has had its ups and downs and
> requires maintenance investment (eg to fix issues, or to do updates if
> there are changes in JIRA) I think we should carefully consider what to
> do with it.
>
> I for one would vote yes on both questions, while we use LP for
> day-to-day work.
>
> Thanks
> Ilias

[1] Atleast the ones related to the b.L MP project that has David Z.
to help as Project manager