RFC: Sprint summary emails

Jirka Tomasek jtomasek at redhat.com
Tue Jul 24 07:48:03 UTC 2012


On 07/23/2012 10:28 PM, Matt Wagner wrote:
> 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

I agree that each story/task should have a decent description that will 
make it much easier for us all to understand what is going on at the 
moment. So this is primarily Redmine thing. The description should be 
provided by either the one who proposed the task or the assignee.
Also I like the Idea of sending the summary for the current sprint to 
the list. With the proper task descriptions in Redmine, this would 
require very little work.

Jirka



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