This year we will take a page from the book of agile project management and agile development in the SUMOdev team. Which for us means biweekly sprints with specific themes and closed bug lists. This will give us at the same time more flexibility to react to upcoming issues, and more control of the schedule we are setting in development.
The SUMOdev team meets every other Tuesday to agree on a theme for the development work of the next two weeks. The goal is to produce specific benefits for users with every sprint.
The first sprint started on January 3 after the sprint planning session. The 2012.1 sprints’ two themes are:
- Getting better search results for users by turning on Elastic Search for real users (specific percentage will depend upon stability and quality)
- Giving the SUMO team a dashboard with User to User help KPIs.
There are a number of other important things going into this sprint, like integration market place support, Karma dashboard features, etc. You can see the full list here.
Every sprint has a number, like “2012.1”. If you search for “s=2012.x” in bugzilla’s whiteboard field you’ll get back the list for sprint x.
We will try hard not to add any more bugs to this list during the sprint, but also: the team is committed to get those bugs fixed within the two weeks of the sprint, so that we’ll have a completely finished product increment after every sprint (we will need 2-3 sprints to figure out our actual velocity, so the first 3 lists might still fluctuate in terms of completeness).
If you want to add anything to the list, please talk to me and I’ll try to schedule it in for the current or next sprint in discussion with our developers and UX designers.
Also, one more note: Since we don’t have Continuous Deployment yet, but push code after a week long baking time on stage, the full results of this sprint will not be in production at the end of the sprint, the 17th, but one week later, on the 24th. This means: Expect a working Elastic Search and a dashboard with user to user KPIs to be live on January 24th.
This is an exciting change of pace. Hopefully it will allow us to spot issues early, and give us a chance to react to them in time, to make sure our plans stay on track. It will also lead to more transparency, and the benefit of more information will hopefully make for happier developers and a happier SUMO team.
Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback on this, I’ll try to answer quickly here or in the SUMO community forums.