Not too long ago a few members of Bebop and I had a conversation that revealed some shortcomings of the Work Finding Checklist.
This sprint I went ahead and updated the checklist to address those.
It should now provide more comprehensive support to team members looking for ways to fill spare hours, while making it clear that finding additional work doesn’t always mean creating and/or adding more tickets to the sprint.
(We generally want to try and complete the existing scope of a sprint before pulling in additional work. For example, if tickets are spilling over with no or very little work done on them, and team members are saying they had trouble finding enough work, something isn’t adding up. )
Also Listaflow UX feedback: I’m confused. Is https://app.listaflow.com/lists/hLQtW8z2RMWA/ a re-usable list, or is that one of Tim’s personal usages of the list? Or something else? I see the list as a “Template” at https://app.listaflow.com/templates but how can I view the list without “Using” it, e.g. if I want to review it for this task? What will happen if I click “Use template” - can I cancel that out again?
It is not clear to me what to do if Week 1 checklist fails. Should we:
a) Wait for Week 2 and do Week 2 checklist
b) Skip to If all else fails checklist
?
(If you’re seeing one, maybe post a screenshot of it here so we can figure out which list you reviewed. It’s probably not the one you were supposed to look at.)
The updated checklist has 4 subsections:
I tried to make the titles self-explanatory, but all subsections except “If you’re a Core Contributor” also include a short description with additional info which you’ll see if you expand them.
I wanted to nest the second subsection (“If you’re a Core Contributor”) under the first one (“At any time”), because its items are also supposed to be completed regardless of where we are in the sprint timeline.
But Listaflow doesn’t seem to be supporting nested subsections right now.
I guess we could consider renaming the second subsection to something like:
@navin Thanks for jumping in and answering Braden’s questions!
@braden I created an example instance of the checklist so others wouldn’t need to go through the process of creating and subsequently archiving their own copy, just for the purpose of checking out the new version
In terms of linking to specific instances of checklists from the handbook, the “problem” (for lack of a better word) is that when checklist definitions change, instances created in the past might not fully reflect the modifications. So the handbook would end up pointing to outdated versions of the checklists. To avoid that we’d have to take the time to create new instances and update the links in the handbook every time any breaking changes are made.
As far as I’m aware, breaking changes are those that add a new component (subsection or task) to an existing list. Simple modifications (e.g. changing text in the label or body of an existing component) will show up when reloading checklist instances.
1. Nit: Could we reword this point slightly to account for the tickets team members are able to solve? For instance, non-developers on the team wouldn’t work on a code ticket. Perhaps it could say something like:
Pick the first ticket at the top of the “Last resort - Accepted” backlog that matches your skill set, and move it to your sprint.
2. Question: Where would we log time for completing the Work Finding Checklist? I didn’t notice if this was mentioned anywhere.
3. Question: Also for the point in the screenshot in my previous message - by “move it to your sprint”, does this mean that we should change the sprint from “Last resort - Accepted” to our current sprint? If so, I didn’t realise this when I went through the checklist previously.
As Navin mentioned, it’s a list that Tim created based on the template, and you can create a new one based on the templates page.
We’re currently finalizing UI/UX rework that will include ‘read-only checklist’ views. Right now it appears you can edit the responses on that list, but they will fail to actually update because you’re not the assignee, since in the interim we made it possible to view other people’s lists even without a read-only style rendering because that information is useful.
There’s no dedicated ticket for logging that time.
My suggestion would be to go with an approach that’s similar to what we usually do:
For tickets that you’re checking in on directly (be they your own or someone else’s) you can log time spent reviewing their status, commenting, etc. to the tickets themselves.
For checklist items that are more general, such as:
Check commitments in SprintCraft […] and offer help to other cell members who are over-committed.
In the Mattermost channel for your cell, ping all epic owners from your cell and ask for more tickets
@tikr Sorry for the missconception. I was referring to the “at any time” section. My question was aimed at resolving if one could skip the “In the second week” section and go straight to If all else fails if you are not in the second week yet.
Maybe the intro can be a little more concise so it’s easier to skim, eg:
If you can’t find enough work to fill your sprint, follow this checklist to ensure:
There’s no work to pull from your existing commitments.
You’ve done everything possible to help other cell members complete their commitments.
All tickets that could be included in the sprint are identified and created.
Mark each item in the checklist as “completed” or “not applicable” to confirm it was explicitly considered. Lastly, the items are ordered to prioritize “working from the right” — ie. focusing on completing the sprint’s existing scope before adding new tickets.
Perhaps for ease of use you can link to the “Contributions board” in this task: Go to the Contributions board and look for PRs against your repos that are missing a reviewer. Schedule a CC Review ticket for each PR that you commit to reviewing. AND the epic in this task: Schedule additional core contributor work to match your time commitment. If you can’t figure out what to work on, post a comment on the Core Contributor epic and ask other CCs for suggestions.
)
