These suggestions are great! I applied most of them
The part I kept unchanged was:
If you can’t find enough work to fill (the rest of) your sprint, …
I think this wording makes sense because it helps clarify that the work finding checklist isn’t just for end-of-sprint scenarios where team members are trying to find more work for the following sprint.
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I like this wording, too But how do you mark a checklist item as “not applicable”? I didn’t think that was possible, but maybe I’m missing something?
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I had tried that, but it turns out that task labels don’t support links. As in, you can add them without getting any errors but they’ll get stripped and don’t make it into the final HTML. And the number of characters supported by task labels is limited. So even if links made it into the final HTML, it sometimes wouldn’t be easy to add them without significantly shortening the text/info in a task label.
The way I had chosen to address this was to put links to the Contributions board and the Core Contributor epic in the bodies of the corresponding tasks:
@tikr Thanks for the update! I only get around to review it now, but it’s great work. Thank you for the proactiveness
Besides making it read-only, it would be worth making it visually & textually more obvious - maybe have a button somewhere visible on an individual list, to create a new list based on the current list’s template?
Ummm @tikr I’m going to blame my 2024 tired brain for this one there is no way to mark something as “not applicable” unless we have an explicit checkbox for it.
Regarding the wording below… I do find it a little confusing - do you mean check the checkboxes so we know they were considered regardless of whether the items were completed or not?
Make sure to check all items as you either complete them or verify they aren’t applicable. That way, it will be clear that they were all explicitly considered.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention @tikr. I think this is fine for now. But I want to flag this with @Fox anyway… I think this is a nice feature to support - adding links within in task labels?
Yes! I like this! A nice way to reuse the sidebar.
Yep, that’s the intended meaning. As far as I know, there’s no way around that since incomplete checklists can’t be submitted. Or did that change recently?
Also, if you have any suggestions for changing this part of the text to say the same thing in a way that would be less confusing, I’d be happy to apply them!
As it turns, there is! If you attempt to submit an incomplete checklist, the checklist will remind you about the tasks you haven’t finished and prompt you to complete them.
However, if you scroll down further, you’ll see the option to submit anyway. In that case the tasks will be left incomplete, but the checklist will be considered complete. This will be understood as deliberately leaving the task unchecked, rather than having been forgotten, which could be understood as ‘Not Applicable.’
@tikr I just want to make sure that when you go through the checklist this (below) is intuitive? Or perhaps we should indicate in the intro text to leave “no applicable” items unchecked?
@cassie I use the feature from time to time, and I think the main issue that prevents it from being intuitive is that, after submitting a partial list, we go back to the top of the form – while the messaging about submitting a partial list is at the bottom next to the submit button. So unless you think of scrolling back down, you might end up editing the form to address all the “Please complete this task” before getting to it.
Probably the best way would be to just change the error message to make it clear that the person can forcibly resubmit.
We don’t want the default to submit with an incomplete list because we would expect this to be an error in a high percentage of cases.
We don’t want to remove going up to the first unchecked box, because if we do that, we leave the user scrambling to figure out which thing they haven’t completed.
So the most salient place that someone would need that information is going to be at the point where they see the incomplete error message that’s scrolled into view.
@Fox Just to make sure I fully understand you, you’re saying that the user can hit “submit” a second time and it will “submit”? If that the case, we should perhaps have a warning message. Something like: “Are you sure you want to submit? You haven’t checked all the items on your checklist. If any items are not applicable and you still wish to proceed, click ‘Submit’ again.”
It feels a bit strange UX wise but might just be “okay” for now. Perhaps in future this could be in form of a modal or something… which feels a bit more standard practice.
@tikr Because you can submit the list without checking off all the items perhaps it would be better to not make all the items mandatory? That confused me. And then in the description mention that only check off applicable items.
@cassie When working on the first version of the updated checklist I played around with making some items optional. What I found was that it didn’t resolve all ambiguities.
For example, from the perspective of someone that’s not a CC, it would make sense to make the items under “At any time (if you’re a Core Contributor)” optional, because they would never have to touch these items. But for someone who is a CC, they are mandatory. So making them optional seemed weird to me from the CC perspective.
The same goes for items under “In the second week”. If someone is completing the checklist to find additional work in the first week of the sprint, the items from that section aren’t just optional, they should actually be skipped. However, if someone works through the checklist in the second week of the sprint, the opposite is true – they must complete these items.
So we cannot make a version of this checklist where the value of the “required” field of each item accurately represents its applicability in all circumstances.
Since we want to make sure that all options for finding additional work have been exhausted before someone picks up a last resort task, it made sense to me to err on the side of caution and mark all items as required by default.
Coupled with the option of submitting the checklist with inapplicable items unchecked, this approach feels intuitive to me.
I just tested submitting an incomplete list again and it triggered a warning/error message which seemed to explain the situation pretty well:
If we’re gonna make some changes to explicitly mention how to deal with items that aren’t applicable, it might make sense to apply them to this message. The work finding checklist isn’t unique in having some items that are generally required but may not apply under specific conditions. It would be good to be able to show some pointers about how to deal with those on every list without having to remember to manually add them to the description of each checklist template.
But how do you mark a checklist item as “not applicable”? I didn’t think that was possible, but maybe I’m missing something? 
there is no way to mark something as “not applicable” unless we have an explicit checkbox for it.
