[teampractices] Measuring core vs maintenance vs new work

Fri Aug 7 22:09:47 UTC 2015

I echo James's suggestion. The engineering teams in Discovery are not
currently using a Kanban-based process and our work is not estimated. If I
were asked to perform this kind of bucketing of our work, I would use
James's method, which I would expect approximates actual workload over any
significant time period.

Hope that helps.

Dan

On 7 August 2015 at 14:50, James Forrester <jforrester at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On 7 August 2015 at 13:50, Greg Grossmeier <greg at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Thanks Joel (and Terry) for that explanation.
>>
>> My next question is about measuring:
>>
>> <quote name="Joel Aufrecht" date="2015-08-07" time="11:00:33 -0700">
>> > So I'm leaning toward a default recommendation of:
>> > 1) Try to track the three buckets (core, maintenance, new functions),
>> and
>> > try to confirm that teams can actually differentiate between them
>> cleanly
>> > enough
>> > 2) don't track bug vs feature
>> > 3) don't track planned vs unplanned, but do be careful not to
>> automatically
>> > conflate unplanned with maintenance.
>>
>> How should a team that doesn't use story points quantify and give a
>> ratio to the three buckets?
>>
>> Story points being, I assume, how teams in eg Discovery, Editing, and
>> Readership will be measuring the size of their buckets.
>>
>
> My general advice is not to worry. In my experience, the number of
> Phabricator tasks in aggregate approximates to the work required to
> complete them. There are always tasks which are trivial and those which are
> major, but it normally doesn't skew much, so don't worry about it as long
> as you're not expecting perfect forecasting (and if you are, this is not
> the biggest of your issues).
>
> Yours,
> --
> James D. Forrester
> Lead Product Manager, Editing
> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
>
> jforrester at wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
>
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>

-- 
Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
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