Canonical community team workflow

[David Planella]

Hi all,

A community member contacted me a few days ago regarding some confusion on
the wording of the weekly community team update I sent to the list. In
particular regarding the fact that it was about some of the work the
Canonical community team had been doing, vs. the global Ubuntu community. I
mentioned I would send a clarification to the list -I'm happy to reword the
subject to include "Canonical" if that helps, but I'd welcome everyone's
feedback.

I thought I would start by presenting an overview of how the Canonical
community team organizes and plans the work on every cycle.

Some of you might have seen the weekly updates not only on this list, but
also from the Engineering teams on the ubuntu-phone mailing list, in an
effort to provide more transparency on the work these teams are doing. Up
until now these have been sent on a weekly basis (ours haven't been while I
was away on vacation), but they might become 3-weekly at some point –if it
ends up to being too much traffic or too much work for the teams to prepare
the updates each week.

The reason I'm mentioning 3 weeks is because this might align better with
the sprints workflow the Engineering teams are adopting. Across Ubuntu
Engineering, we're using Agile [1] techniques to drive the work of the
teams, based mostly on using a backlog to plan work items or user stories
and schedule these in 3-week sprint units. Thus it might be easy for
everyone to provide an update of the work items completed at the end of a
sprint. I'm oversimplifying the process, but that's the gist of it.

Now, while we're not an Engineering team, the Canonical community team have
also embraced this workflow for consistency, and adapted it to our needs.
It does not change the work that we do, just the methods we use to plan and
keep progress: in the past, we used Launchpad blueprints to track work
items, we also used Trello at some point, and now we've implemented this
workflow with Trello again.

We used to have a community Trello board where community members from
different teams kept work items as cards, which we decided to revive for
planning future work and to encourage participation from everyone who wants
to contribute to these or their own projects in the board. That's the
backlog at https://trello.com/b/gUSRcADH/community-team-backlog

## The backlog

While it does not reflect all of the tasks that we do as individuals, it
contains what we are planning to work on as a team.

Projects that we are planning to work on at some point in time are put as
cards in the generic Community backlog, either as actions or as bigger user
stories broken down into actions inside the cards.

In some cases where it makes sense to keep a logical grouping of user
stories or actions for a particular project, we create a Trello list as a
container (e.g. the Developer documentation backlog), but everything this
board is considered a backlog item with the same status.

## Sprints

When it comes down to burning down the backlog items, we meet and schedule
what can be worked on in a sprint. A sprint is a unit of 3 weeks that will
contain all of the backlog items we've assessed to be doable in that period.

Each sprint has an individual board where cards from the backlog are moved
to on the start date, and we sprint continously using these 3 week cycles
to work through the backlog

This is an example of the sprint we started this week:
https://trello.com/b/bpy3UnKv/community-team-sprint-5

## User stories

Where it applies, we work from specs built from user stories:

As a $PERSONA
I want to $DOSOMETHING
so that I can $BENEFIT

In turn, the user stories are broken down into multiple actions to describe
and go through the steps necessary to implement a particular story.

That's mostly it. In general, we do the planning of the cycle after UOS,
although this time we've started working on the 15.10 strategy a bit later
than that.

I hope you find this overview useful and please let us know if you've got
any questions or feedback!

Cheers,
David.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
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