More reviewer time?

Sprints app - Public
#1

I’ve been finding that Sprints’ default time allocations for task reviews aren’t sufficient for a reviewer to offer much help on the task.

Also, we don’t currently allocate any time for reviewing an epic, but I think there are cases where more mentoring and assistance would likely be helpful. For instance, if someone is new to client or epic ownership, or this is the first time they’ve set up a new instance, they might be more likely to ask for advice from their epic reviewer if there’s time allocated for this.

Is anyone else finding this?

Task review estimates

Currently, the default is (ref code):

  • 1 hour for story points less than 3
  • 2 hours for story points 3 and above

We can override the sprints review estimate with a crafty directive, but if others are feeling this issue too, I’d propose changing it to something like:

  • 0.5 hour for story points less than 2 (since 1 point tasks usually require hardly any review)
  • 1 hour for 2 point tasks
  • 2 hours for 3 point tasks
  • 3 hours for 5 point tasks
  • 5 hours for tasks with more than 5 points

Epic review estimates

There’s no crafty directive for adding epic reviewer time, but a workaround could be to create a recurring task in the epic for the epic reviewer to block out time.

13 Likes
#2

I think this is a good idea and could also help to (slightly) reduce overcommitment.

1 Like
#3

Hey @jill thanks for raising this, since I have been involved in a lot of reviews recently and I find myself overstepping the 1-hour review budget a lot of times, it can be because I am relatively new to the process.

But also there are times that some solution takes a bit of time to review and test because of the complexities involved. So definitely the 2-hour mark for 3 point task makes a lot of difference and would definitely help to reduce the pressure :slight_smile:

#4

Anybody else want to weigh in on this?

@nizar Can I create a small task under SE-3547 to alter Sprints calculations for reviewer time?

#5

I love the suggestion, but I’m not sure the Sprint Planning Checklist Automation epic would be appropriate for creating the change.

Do you think the Sprints v2 epic might be more suitable for this change?

I’m pretty sure the change isn’t that large so feel free to create the ticket, either way, and we can later on adjust the account and the epic :+1:

#6

Yes! Thank you for pointing me there, @nizar.

Created BB-3992.

1 Like
#7

Thank you for handling it, @jill! I’ve made some small updates to the description - we should use this opportunity to move this out from a hardcoded logic to a more flexible configuration. I will move this ticket out to GitLab later.

I’m just wondering about one thing - what should be the default value for the review time? Most tickets are not estimated (null story points) before the last day of the sprint, so we should have some default value for them. Currently, we’re assuming 0 story points for such tickets, which results in an initial estimate of 1h for the review. If we keep it like this, it is going to be 0.5h. Should we have a more generous default value to avoid surprises after the estimates are moved to the tickets?

Side note: would it make sense to move this thread to the Sprints app - Public category?

#8

Making this configuration-driven sounds much better, thank you @Agrendalath.

Oo… good question. Under the proposed change, the average review time would be 2.3 (though that doesn’t take into account the frequency of the various story point probabilities).

So how about a default of 2h?

Done :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#9

Sounds good to me. I’ve updated the ticket’s description.