I don't imagine that any more work would get done and certainly any new meta-work would need to produce concrete results. What might happen; however, is that by focusing the 'cats' on a specific and clear set of JIRAs we could end up with more coherent releases, better code knowledge by everybody and improved quality due to more eyeballs on sections of our sprawling code base in each release.
For me personally, spending some time in the classification or recommendation code would be a good thing. It would be outside of my comfort zone initially but I could become productive. If the focus of an epic would be to make some concrete improvements in recommendation, for example, I'd need somebody like you to break it down into bite-sized pieces but I would contribute. We have already discussed further unification of classification and clustering: I could help break that down into small stories that most developers could tackle. I'd like to get out of my comfort zone silo, maybe there are other 'cats' who would like to get out of theirs too? On a scale of "let's do a few things well" to "well, let's do a few more things" I think we are way trending to the latter goal. I get that is your concern too. In my day jobs we use Agile to focus our efforts towards the former goal. I'm just wondering if it would work here too. -----Original Message----- From: Sean Owen [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2011 10:29 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Improving Our JIRA State It's all a fine idea in theory. There are already epic JIRAs out there though. I've already tried to organize without much effect. There are few 'cats' to herd out there (active committers). I don't think these are getting at the problem, which is quite simply big sprawling scope versus not enough hands willing to support it. The level of interest in planning-to-do here is great, but it's just meta-work being done here, and we've had plenty of these chats before. They aren't real progress unfortunately. It would be great if there were more interest in doing, so we could tackle a larger scope. There isn't, so I am pretty certain the focus should be cutting down scope and repairing the things that have already long been noted in JIRA. That is -- there's a pretty clear to-do list not being done. One can say, let's talk about why it's not being done, let's form a new process, let's shuffle the papers, let's write new to-dos. Why would that not end up with another bigger to-do list? Why is more work going to get done? On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 5:42 PM, Jeff Eastman <[email protected]> wrote: > Changing the title, I'm tired of being "demoralized". I want to improve the > state of our JIRAs and planning overall by building upon my previous remarks > (cf. "RE: Demoralized over JIRA state" above). > > If we wanted to apply an Agile/Scrum process to Mahout development, we could: > > * Identify a "Product Owner" to develop "epic" JIRAs to focus our > development and to prioritize our backlog by quarterly release. Each release > would then have a theme and would be a complete set of concrete enhancements > with user-centric goals. Perhaps even a users@ member could take on this > role, IMHO it does not need to be a developer, but someone who can work to > establish and communicate a vision and a roadmap. > > * Identify a "Scrum Master" to drive the creation of specific "story" > JIRAs and guide development. This is a bit more like herding cats than > managing people. This probably needs to be a committer as it has much more > technical content and knowledge of the code base. We are all doing Mahout > part-time so the schedule will be less predictable. But with Agile metrics > computable if points are assigned to the stories we could at least measure > our velocity quarterly. > > Burndowns anybody? > Jeff > >
