At Linaro, one way or another, we do a weekly report cycle to our groups, members and Linaro.
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For our group, we have chosen to use Jira directly and update the stories wetasks we're working on as often as necessary. This is mainly up to the engineers, but it has to be done at least once a week.
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Furthermore, project managers and tech leads scan the Jira updates (using weekly and monthly filters based on changes to cards) to know what happened. These updates are scanned by hand and scripts, and they update other project management structures, "Health Check" and "Engineering Update" reports every month.
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Three Levels
Our Jira has 4 3 levels:
Initiatives
- Major projects, discussed at the TSC level with vague descriptions and general ideas.
- Owned by the TSC representatives
- Long term (year+ scale)
- Engineers should ignore these
Epics
- Breakdown of initiatives, with concrete expectations, definite tasks
- Owned by the main engineer working on it (or tech-lead in case of multiple)
- Medium term (month week~month scale)
Stories
- Breakdown of epics, short self-contained tasks that describe how epics will be done
- Owned by the engineer working on it
- Short term (week scaleEngineers should update it at least once a week with TSC updates (not working comments)
Sub-tasks
- Breakdown of storiesepics, only used if the stories are too complex/bigwhere the work actually happens
- Owned by the engineer working on it
- Very short term (day day~week scale)
- These are not required and not encouraged
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- All working comments, attachments and discussions should go here
TSC members only see Initiatives and Epics, so we keep the noise down on that level and crank it up at the Story sub-task level. Right now we update the members with a "Health Check" card and the "Engineering Update", so the epics are mostly for organisational purposes. But they still shouldn't have noise, so we do not update them with development comments. All of that go into storiestasks.
Basic Rules
Managing Epics
If you own an Epic, make sure the stories tasks beneath it are up-to-date and reflect your current work, at least to a week granularity. Feel free to update your stories once a week or every hour, whatever makes you more productive.
Do not update Epics with comments or attachments, only use it to create new storiestasks and high-level update once a week. Create as many stories tasks as you need, whatever makes you more productive.
Feel free to resolve stories tasks that won't be worked on. I The tech-lead will look at all the resolved tasks weekly and close them or ask you questions (like where's the docs, commit link, how did you test, etc).
If you finished working on an epic, or need to create a new epic, talk to me, we'll do that together. the tech-lead, so you can close it and properly update the TSC with the result of that work.
This is intended to reduce the noise at the TSC level.
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The updates are better if they're done as soon as you finished a step in your work, or at the end of each day, so that we can have an idea of pace. But that's not always possible, so we shouldn't create strict rules around it.
The minimum amount that is required, however, is at least one update per week, on the cards that you have actually worked on. Simple comments, like "still progressing, now implemented X and Y", are more than enough.
Also make sure to keep the workflow correct. Only keep In Progress what you're actively working on that week, and move to Upstream Review what's waiting on the community or back to TODO what you have put on hold.
Important: Do not update work hours / points on the Jira cards. Those are completely ignored by everyone and every script. Instead, just keep the right cards in the right columns and that's more than we need.
Plans for next week
Open tasks epics are unassigned, meaning no one will work on them any time soon. Once you plan on working with something, assign that card to you (or create a new one and assign it), so that it appears in your TODO column.
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- regular comments means regular work being done
- cards to be in the right columns
Important: Do not update work hours / points on the Jira cards. Those are completely ignored by everyone and every script. Instead, just keep the right cards in the right columns and that's more than we need.
Problems and blockages
All problems and blockages should be reported immediately at the appropriate channels, copying your internal development list and your tech lead.
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