Listaflow: What to build first?

Discussions - Public
#1

Hi @team!

You may have seen the Discovery @nizar put together for the Workflow Manager.

We’re now in the process of finalising the UX/UI Discovery, and the next step is to decide which workflow / process / feature to build first. We’d love to hear your ideas! Since you’ll all be the actual users of the tool, your insight would be really useful. :slightly_smiling_face:

A few things to keep in mind:

  • Prototypes will be used where possible

  • By the end of the first development sprint, we should have something valuable, that can be used by the team immediately

  • As such, the decision for what is built first should be based on what would be manageable during a single sprint

  • Due to this iterative approach, there will likely be compromises when it comes to features, development quality, and UX polish, but these can all be improved on over time

Some suggestions that have been put forward:

Discussions about these suggestions:

Xavier :

What workflow should we use for this? It could be the sprint planning one, but that might be a complex one to start with, especially since that would require switching the whole team to it immediately. What about the recruitment process? The goal could be to replicate the functionality of the corresponding recruitment board, which is simpler, and has only 4 users. @nizarmah Any other candidate workflow you could think of?

Nizar:

I feel like we can further simplify things and go with something from the handbook, such as the Vacation Checklist, as a start. This checklist does not require any “record keeping” or anything, so it would be great for a basic “workflow” without any workflow runs or discussions/comments from the start.

And once we have the necessary requirements for the recruitment workflow, maybe then we can switch to it?

I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud. But the reason I am stating this is because it’s much simpler, has less of the available requirements (such as an actual assignee).

Xavier:

We could do that too yep. On the inconvenient side, using that process means immediately switching the whole team to it, rather than a small group, and this wouldn’t be something for which we already use Monday.com for.

Your turn:

With the above in mind, please complete the poll below, and add any suggestions, thoughts, or concerns you might have.

Thanks!
Ali

What workflow or process should we build first?
  • Recruitment Board
  • Vacation Checklist
  • Other (please specify in a comment)

0 voters

1 Like
#2

Thanks for the post @Ali! Would you mind maybe adding a small Poll in order to help users vote without the need to comment? The “Build a poll” button is hidden under that Cog icon.

#3

Good idea @nizar. What do you have in mind? A poll with the following 3 choices: Recruitment Board, Vacation Checklist, Other?

#4

Yeah that sounds like a good idea, to give members a chance to recommend something else :+1:
Thanks for recommending that :smiley:

#5

Done! Thanks for the idea @nizar :+1:

1 Like
#6

@Ali Thanks for starting this thread! :+1:

To also provide context on the discussion here, it might make sense to provide the arguments discussed in the discovery review:

Xavier:

What workflow should we use for this? It could be the sprint planning one, but that might be a complex one to start with, especially since that would require switching the whole team to it immediately. What about the recruitment process? The goal could be to replicate the functionality of the corresponding recruitment board, which is simpler, and has only 4 users. @nizarmah Any other candidate workflow you could think of?

Nizar:

I feel like we can further simplify things and go with something from the handbook, such as the Vacation Checklist, as a start. This checklist does not require any “record keeping” or anything, so it would be great for a basic “workflow” without any workflow runs or discussions/comments from the start.

And once we have the necessary requirements for the recruitment workflow, maybe then we can switch to it?

I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud. But the reason I am stating this is because it’s much simpler, has less of the available requirements (such as an actual assignee).

Xavier:

We could do that too yep. On the inconvenient side, using that process means immediately switching the whole team to it, rather than a small group, and this wouldn’t be something for which we already use Monday.com for.

1 Like
#7

Thanks @antoviaque. I’ve updated the post to include those discussions.

1 Like
#8

The @team has spoken - we will be tackling the Vacation Checklist first!

Thanks to everyone who voted.

Watch this space… :rocket:

3 Likes
#9

@Ali @Fox How far along are we with Listaflow now? Is a first MVP version ready?

I’m asking because there is the need to replace Friday.app for the check-ins/updates of core sprints by early June – and since the feature set of Listaflow and what we need from Friday.app aren’t very far, I’m wondering if it would make sense to suggest using it in that case? That would help ensuring we adapt to different workflows/orgs from the get go.

In case we think there might be a case for this, I’ve created a task on the gitlab project to start looking into this – it would need product work to specify what we would want exactly, and a collaboration on the technical side to ensure this would be doable by early June?

#10

It is not ready, but I expect we will have an MVP ready within the next few sprints. Right now we’re targeting a simplified version of the vacation checklist for our first release.

In order to properly support the Sprint checklist, we will need to design the UX conditional task handling and write the implementation for it. We will also need to write the team/role management code. CC @Ali

I believe this is possible, but it will require allocating more of the team’s hours to development. The primary hold-up until this point has been freeing myself up from other work and then writing Providence to make sure that our frontend work doesn’t become a massive mess of boilerplate.

The last (at least, for our current needs) major feature of Providence (form handling) is slated for this sprint, but even if it spills into the next there’s still much that can be done with it and which we need to build. Once it’s complete, and the initial frontend tickets are completed, development pace can be rapidly accelerated. The basic scaffolding for the frontend has already been completed by @navin using Providence-- and much faster than I (or even he, per the ticket estimation) had anticipated. Next up is styling, authentication and deployment. Once those are all done we’ll have something very basic to look at and most other features will be fair game for implementation based on our priorities.

@tikr @farhaan Right now I think we’re counting maybe one or two task’s worth of hours in per sprint for the workflow manager, but perhaps after this next sprint or two we could greatly increase the number of hours dedicated to the work. Between the dev work and @Ali designing, what would the impact to the team be if we greatly increased the number of hours spent on Listaflow? What might we have to pare back on, if anything? I know it’s an accelerated epic whose hours we’re not even close to approaching. What would it look like if we even used half of our budget? All of it?

If needed since it might involve discussing client budgets, you can reply to that question on the Listaflow epic ticket. :slight_smile:

Also CC to @nizar since I think this news will be a source of joy.

4 Likes
#11

@fox and I are ironing out a few last things on the wireframes for registration and authentication, and I will start working on the UI design for these pages this week. I am hoping to have the UI design and style guide updates complete by the time you all return from the conference, if not before.

The design of the Vacation Checklist already accounts for conditional tasks. Is this the type of task handling you mean? Or are their additional requirements?

The screens for this would all still need to be wireframed and designed. I can schedule this in next once the registration and authentication UI is complete.

I’m looking forward to seeing Listaflow take shape! :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes
#12

@Fox @Ali OK, thanks for the details. How much time do you need to figure it if this will be possible, or not? I’ll need to schedule a discovery to figure out the replacement quickly, as this will require some discussions on the forum afterwards, and migrating to the new system before Friday.app shuts down. We should know what we can offer to the community with Listaflow (if anything) before that, to be able to include it in the discussions on the official forum.

#13

Wait, hold on a minute. Is the deadline of June because Friday.app is shutting down and we’re worried the sprint checklist won’t be available?

…We use Monday, not Friday.app. I don’t think we use Friday.app for anything, unless I missed some big change?

#14

Oh! I forgot that we did have a UX for it already. Though, we don’t for authoring-- however this is less of an immediate concern if we just want to run checklists. We will need to add in implementation for conditional tasks in any case.

#15

@Fox Just to make sure we’re on the same page - by “authoring”, do you mean the ability for users to create new checklist templates? If so, perhaps I can tackle this (and perhaps the page that lists checklist templates) in the next round of wireframes.

#16

It’s not for our sprints, but for the Open edX Core Contributors sprints :) We use Monday.com at OpenCraft, but I’ve used Friday.app for collecting the Open edX core check-ins. See for example:

and the original thread:

I’ll add you and Ali to Friday.app so you can get an idea (just make sure to disable/delete new check-ins you create, so it doesn’t end up spamming everyone :) ).

(and yes we don’t need authoring – since I manage the core contributors sprints, I can be the one changing manually a config file or source code even, if needed.)

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#17

Ahhh! Well, alright, then. I’ll take a look at the invite you sent and see if there are any curveballs we need to consider in the implementation, then.

Yes, though, as mentioned by @antoviaque , other aspects of the app should be focused on first, since we can always use the Django admin for creating the templates in the meantime, and we’ll only need a few of them for our internal cases to start.

3 Likes
#18

@Fox Sorry for the delayed response, I only got around to looking into this in more detail today.

That should definitely be doable :+1:

I made a pass over the capacity allocations for May and there’s a few client-related items that we’ll need to update based on input from epic owners (pinged them in the epic planning spreadsheet). Once that’s done we’ll have a better idea of the number of hours that will be available.

It’s probably worth noting that I’m only looking at this from the perspective of capacity planning for Bebop. Since @Ali is in Deathstar her hours aren’t part of Bebop’s monthly availability; it would be up to her to let us know how many hours she could dedicate to Listaflow, based on her other commitments :slight_smile:

Assuming that the total monthly budget that we’d be willing to spend is still 240h (?), it doesn’t look like Bebop would have room to spend all of it in May. (June might be a different story.)

However, based on my current (= very rough) estimates for capacity needs of the client projects that don’t have allocations set yet, something like 120-160h might be possible for Listaflow in May. This is assuming that Bebop wouldn’t be spending substantial hours on the other accelerated epics in May.

CC @antoviaque @farhaan

1 Like
#19

@antoviaque @Fox

From a design point of view, I don’t see why we couldn’t move the Sprint Planning & Retro Checkins to Listaflow.

I screenshot the 4 components used in the friday.app Core Contributor checkins and added them below for easy reference (the Listaflow design currently only supports checklist items). @antoviaque Just to make sure we’re on the same page, is this what you have in mind:

  • add similar components as the below to Listaflow
  • allow admin users to create a checkin template
  • allow admin users to run a checkin template (and send it to Core Contributors)
  • allow Core Contributors to answer checkins
  • collate responses

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#20

Thanks @tikr. I’ll need to sit down and figure out my availability. I could also get Cassie’s help on the design, but I know she has a lot to do on the Open edX Theme, so I’m not sure that’ll be possible. I’ll wait to hear if my understanding of Xavier’s request is correct, and then will try to figure out my schedule.

Is there some way of knowing which projects take priority over others?