In my admittedly limited experience with Agile, it has lived up to its
promise. I'm not sure how much of the details of Agile would be helpful
vs more abstract meta-work that has been alluded to already, but it
might help quantify outstanding technical debt and assist us in
narrowing the scope down to the same order of magnitude as number of
"cats", particularly as we move toward a 1.0 release?...
I particularly like Jeff's idea of branching outside our comfort zones;
I'd still love to finish the spectral package, but I'd also like to
assist in the unification of classification and clustering (just
throwing that out there). I know that's more meta-work, but as the
prereqs of my first two years of PhD studies are wrapping up, there will
be another "cat" readily available for picking up at least some of the
slack.
On 10/26/2011 2:37 PM, Jeff Eastman wrote:
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
