Tackling sprints without enough tasks

[tikr (Tim Krones)]

Unestimated tickets

Aside from effects of this that others already listed, it also impacts sustainability management to some degree. Specifically, it makes sustainability previews somewhat unreliable because the data that relevant calculations depend on is incomplete.

For example, when compiling the sustainability preview for Sprint 312 at the end of Sprint 311, 35% of tickets in these two sprints had no remaining estimate.

Shifting the end-of-sprint schedule by a day

• This would help with reliability of sustainability previews (which are always posted on Monday W3) in that on average, the percentage of tickets with no remaining estimate should be much lower by Monday W3.
• It would make sprint planning for ASU MoE tighter – the final sprint planning meeting for the following sprint happens on Wednesday W2, more or less right before my EOD.
  • In the current setup I’m able to help @paulo on Thursday W2 with creating tickets for any items that came up during the meeting.
  • With the proposed setup that won’t be an option anymore; @paulo will need to create tickets himself right after the meeting on Wednesday W2.

Running out of work during a sprint

@jill

If people run out of work during a sprint, we also suggest:

• Ping assignees on “not started” tasks to see if you can take it over.
• For tasks where you’re a reviewer, ping assignee to offer help.

, and also:

• Look through the list of blocked tickets and ask assignees if there is anything you can do to help get them unblocked.

This includes pinging reviewers on upstream PRs. (In theory, assignees should do this for PRs waiting for upstream review at least once per sprint, but experience has shown that it’s easy to forget. Which doesn’t make it any less important… )

Sprint planning and management for Serenity

@gabor

@Fox

The tasks are generated based on tags/roles, and we could change how they apply to Serenity team members. My sprint checklist only has 11 tasks, whereas Bebop cell members typically have many more, for instance.

As mentioned above, we did not do it with Matjaz as Serenity is two of us, and the Sprint Planning Manager role suits for 4+ members as I experienced it. […]

@Fox I believe that would be a relief, though we would need to figure out what tasks are not applying. […]

The scope of cell management roles (including sprint planning and sprint management) is already smaller for Serenity than for other roles, see Cell-Specific Rules > Serenity > Roles.

So maybe this is mostly a matter of making sure that Serenity’s checklist items for sprint planning and management (as currently defined in Listaflow) match cell-specific definitions of these roles?

Generating and finding tasks

@antoviaque

Would it help to get dedicated tasks assigned to some of the epic owners, when we see that upcoming sprints are going to be missing tasks?

That might be helpful, yep.

However, to save some overhead it might also make sense to try and double-down on our existing processes:

Right now, each epic owner already has a recurring task that involves creating tickets for upcoming sprints – the epic itself.

(When using appropriate Crafty directives to block out time for epic management, I think SprintCraft takes these into account when calculating remaining hours to fill for the following sprint, but maybe I’m misremembering. CC @Agrendalath)

So maybe we could start by having epic owners block out a bit more time for epic management each sprint so that they have room for planning further ahead?

At least in the coming weeks it would be useful to try and do this across the board, and for several sprints in a row – with recruitment for Bebop being so successful lately (), the cell is a bit overstaffed going into the holiday period, so sourcing more billable work by planning ahead would be a good idea.

And while I don’t think this type of work should be left until the end of the sprint, epic owners could report results of their efforts when posting their bi-weekly epic updates (by listing tickets to work ahead on). Epic planning managers could then take care of checking that epic updates include relevant info, and follow up as necessary.