RFC: Sprint summary emails

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Mon Jul 23 20:28:11 UTC 2012


Hi folks,

As I return from PTO and try to catch up, I wanted to propose an idea.

I think it'd be swell if, at the beginning of each sprint, we sent out
an email outlining what we hope to accomplish, with a little blurb on
each story, a quick estimate, and who (if anyone yet) is taking it. It
could also spell out the start and end dates, as well as any other
notable dates (code freeze, etc.) It would help people like me get up to
speed more quickly, but much more importantly, I think it would be
interesting to people monitoring Aeolus development but not necessarily
participating full-time.

Picking a random example from the backlog that I'm semi-familiar with,
we have #3499, which reads "As a user, I want a consistent, coherent UI"
with no further explanation. There's been other discussion of this, so I
happen to know what it means, but it's ultra-vague as published in
Redmine. It seems like it would be quite helpful if it got a blurb in a
beginning-of-sprint email like:

-------%<----------
 #3499 - As a user, I want a consistent, coherent UI
We've been gathering a list of UI annoyances on the wiki:
https://www.aeolusproject.org/redmine/projects/aeolus/wiki/List_of_UI_Annoyances
For this story, we plan to review that list and identify the "quick
fixes" that don't require much discussion/consideration, and then
implement them. This should make the Aeolus user experience much more
satisfying.
Jiri has volunteered to lead this; it is estimated at 13 points.
-------%<----------

Admittedly, writing this up for each story is a decent bit of work.
However, it's really nothing but a quick summary of what we discuss on
sprint planning calls. I think this would have two benefits:
1.) It would be very useful as far as making it clear what we are doing,
especially to outsiders. (It would have an incidental benefit for people
like me, that miss a sprint planning call, but that's not the primary
goal.)
2.) It would force us start to write decent descriptions for our tasks.

If people agree that this is useful, I'd be happy to take a stab at
writing it up next sprint during/after the planning call. What do you
think? And should Conductor/Infra emails be separate, or combined?

-- Matt



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