Agile Development Process Update

[Aakash Desai]

Hey All,

mbrandt and I got into a meeting to talk about agile, scrumbu.gs and process going forward. There was some planning that went in and some exciting take-aways. The tl;dr version:

* We're going to adopt scrumbugs starting on July 1st
* The two of us are going to start asserting ourselves with process with bug triage, communications and getting folks involved

We'll be updating everyone as this gets more finely grained, but you can take a look at the following etherpad for details on what we talked about and our take-aways.

https://mozillians.etherpad.mozilla.org/agile-breakdown


Thanks All,
Aakash Desai
Product Manager, Community Tools
Mozillians Profile: http://mozillians.org/aakashd

[James Socol]

I have a couple takeaways from this email:

* I'm extremely concerned that dev wasn't included in this meeting. We are major stakeholders here.
* Using scrumbugs is a very small part of agile planning--it's only a tool (and not a strictly necessary one at that, it's just a nice visualization) it's not actually a planning strategy.
* The point system fundamentally comes from devs. There is input from product (sometimes QA) and it's a good opportunity to clear up any miscommunication in bug reports or feature requests, but assigning point values is a process that must include devs for it to work.

Before we decide to suddenly use this, I would like everyone to attend, as observers, an MDN planning poker meeting. This is the process where "points" get decided.

Truth told, from where I stand we are not ready to jump into this yet.

[Aakash Desai]

Hey James,

The language in the e-mail made it sound like things were "done" and I'm sorry that it seemed that way. Actually, we knew the move to Agile had already been dictated (by yourself a month ago) and we  were trying to get ourselves caught up with what we needed to do on the product and QA side of things to implement the process.

Matt and I are fully aware that this process change needs to include dev and we repeatedly said so to each other in our meeting. The two of us are trying to help by being prepared to have the entire team ready to make the plan together.

Agile is a tool, but one that I think can work wonders here. Heck, we looked around and saw the point system being used by the MDN wonderfully and made a take-away in investigating how that worked. We were just going to ask how they use it, but going to the planning poker meetings sounds like a lot better idea. As an aside, who is the right person to ask to about that?

Hope this helped alleviate your concerns.

-- Aakash