[bind10-dev] hardening sprint thoughts

[Michal 'vorner' Vaner]

Hello

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 10:55:31AM +0100, Jelte Jansen wrote:
> There are a lot of tasks and tickets of relative minor importance,
> that tend to get dropped off sprints; Every sprint, this is a choice
> we make, and of course it is much more important to work on the Big
> Stuff, rather than those smallish minor improvements. However, as
> Shane can probably attest now, this leaves a LOT of stuff undone, most
> of which (I think) would not be much work. It leaves known bugs for
> users to find, which is always bad, and I think we also all have a
> number of tickets we know of and have been wanting to fix for ages,
> but never got around to.

Definitely. But I probably got used and forgot about most of them, the ability
of human brain to adapt is both a blessing and a curse ;-).

I think I like the idea of hardening sprits (I don't know why it's called
hardening, though. Does it make the code harder to run or the software harder to
use?)

> I'm also considering another change: Right now, I only request
> estimates for the tickets in next-sprint-proposed, and the tickets
> that I know are related to the features we will be working on. I think
> we should get every ticket estimated. The immediate change would be
> that I'll also be requesting estimates for tickets in the New queue,
> and once Shane is done munging through all tickets, get the rest done
> as well. So take note, initially the estimation burden will increase
> quite a bit :p. I am hoping this will have the side effect of better
> understanding of and discussion on tickets, before they are even
> proposed to a sprint.

Hmm, two notes about it:
 * I'd be very against estimating all the tickets in one go. That would drive
   all people and most AI's (todays of of future) mad. And we would not take
   enough care to do it properly. So setting a quota of 10-20 more tickets from
   the backlog should be considered.
 * I'm not sure how old an estimates can be until it is useless. I fear that our
   unit estimate is changing or fluctuating over the time. So a ticket estimated
   a year ago to 3 would be different difficulty than ticket estimated to 3 now.
   And we won't handle all the tickets soon, there will be some that will sleep
   in the backlog for a long time.

With regards

-- 
chown -R us $BASE

Michal 'vorner' Vaner
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