Managing Status reporting and work backlog items

[Frank Mueller]

I like it as a lightweight method and so giving a high benefit for little effort. Especially the visualization gives a good and quick feedback regarding the pace. And we need to get a good feeling for the size of those todo items, not too big, not too small. Then we also should have no problem with misleading charts. The examples below show a good direction.

mue

> I raised this briefly on IRC this morning, but wanted to start a quick discussion about how we can help folks outside of our team understand the status of the go port and any other work (MongoDB trial, etc) that needs to be done between now and 12.10. 
> 
> Rick Spencer showed me a tool that looks at the work items field in LP blueprints like this one: 
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/servercloud-q-arm-deployment
> where each "todo" item is just a line like this: 
> [mark-mims] Charm testing on ARM (emulation only): TODO
> [ikepanhc] Add highbank kernel to quantal: DONE
> [rbasak] Port highbank support to new flash-kernel: DONE
> [rbasak] Enable highbank installer images: DONE
> 
> and creates fancy charts: 
> http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-quantal/group/topic-quantal-servercloud-arm.html
> Which roll up to higher level reporting on the release status: 
> http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-quantal/canonical-server.html
> http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-quantal/
> Since the goal here is just to provide communication to the rest of the company on our status as efficiently as possible it seems to me to make sense to re-use as much of this reporting infrastructure as we reasonably can. 
> 
> We could create a Juju-Core topic with some basic blueprints for the high level items that need to be ported over to Go, or done in this cycle, and then just add a few work items for each of the blueprints and mark them off as we complete them.   I doubt this would take more than a few minutes a week, and it would help the rest of the organization fell like they have some visibility into what we are all working on.
> 
> It will also help us to have some visibility into the backlog of work as we work through the process of prioritizing incoming requests against our existing workload.
> 
> --Mark Ramm

--
** Frank Mueller <frank.mueller at canonical.com>
** Software Engineer - Juju Development
** Canonical