<div dir="ltr">Hi all, <div> 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 <a href="https://trello.com/b/gUSRcADH/community-team-backlog">https://trello.com/b/gUSRcADH/community-team-backlog</a> ## 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: <a href="https://trello.com/b/bpy3UnKv/community-team-sprint-5">https://trello.com/b/bpy3UnKv/community-team-sprint-5</a> ## 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] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development</a> </div></div>