2012-01-23 DfR Technical Meeting

Regular Attendees

• Andrew
• Bill
• Brad
• Chris
• Dan
• Jonathan

General

• Call In To: Free Conference Call HD - DuraCloud Line

  Please note that we will be using the Free Conference Call HD line for this call. Information about calling into this line is available from the link above.

• - Indicates who will be taking minutes

Discussion Topics

Actions from last meeting

DfR Software Next Steps - Jan 2012
2012-01-03 - Architecture Meeting, Temple University

Status

• Andrew
  • DuraCloud/Shib architecture updates
• Bill
• Brad
• Chris
  • With Dan developed a strawman design for the Object Creation Service.
• Dan
  • See Chris' note above.
• Jonathan
  • Scheduled Advisory Group Meeting Feb 3
  • Negotiating with Fluid
  • Discussions with Thorny, Mark

Minutes

Project & Partners (Jonathan):

• Got more spreading of the word. Gave DfR presentation at PA-SIG, will also be discussing at Gold Sponsor forum.
• Advisory mtg. coming beginning of Feb, to bring people up to date & get feedback. Will also be scheduling meeting with other group (doesn't have a name), people who were at workshop in DC. Want to keep that group together somehow.
• Had interesting discussions with Fluid, Thorny, then a meeting w/Thorny, Mark, and Brad. Want to figure out how Fluid will be engaged in the project. Also with Smithsonian/DGI. Fluid isn't a consulting firm, gets most funding through grants. Fairly choosy in terms of work they take on. Look for projects where they can have an initial influence on shaping the user experience. Fluid could work with DfR-core since it's fairly open, but there's less of a blank slate with the existing Smithsonian work, so it's unclear how it could fit.
• Bill: Is there a backup plan if Fluid decides not to work with us?
• Jonathan: If Fluid doesn't do it then somebody else will. UI work for DfR core is not as involved as work for Smithsonian piece.

Process (Dan):

• End of last meeting, it was clear we needed to discuss process/tools/etc. up front.
• All: Going forward, if you have a meeting on Skype, etc, copy + paste notes in meeting area on wiki.
• Posted taskboard link. Might be a good place to start. Andrew noted we need to get story points on there. Currently they're only on stories, but might be good to have them on other types of tasks. (General agreement)
• Bill and Andrew report success with using Fibonacci numbers for story points.
• Andrew: Thinking of story points as the ideal day is as far as we go. We don't look at them as an estimate of how long things will take. Instead, over time, we use the total story points per time period (velocity) to accurately estimate how long a given number of story points will take.
• Dan: Have you used a fixed amount of time per iteration?
• Bill & Andrew: Not strict, but set a date within next couple months.
• Dan: How long do you freeze code?
• Bill: A week.
• Bill: We should have a common understanding of what epics and stories mean for this team.
• Dan: Strawman suggestion: We use stories to talk about features explainable to a user. Use tasks to complete stories as normal JIRA items. Then use an Epic as a unit of budget.
• Chris: Kind of concerned about issue explosion.
• Bill: Share this concern.
• Dan: Usually story doesn't change.
• Chris: Suggest using Story for features, Bugs for Bugs. Tracking time in both.
• Andrew: Issue with that is a story isn't really couched as a feature, but as a user story, so it's not necessarily something that we can apply story points to.
• (Further discussion)
• Evolved to this approach:
  • One ideal work day per point, as done with DuraCloud project.
  • Use tasks (bugs, features) for estimating when things can be done. They get story points.
  • Use epics and stories for budgeting, and describing features in tangible ways for users. Estimation still has to happen at this level, so story points will be used here to.
  • ACTION: Add Features (tasks, and/or others) to DFR project in JIRA. These should all support story points.
• Jonathan: If we're planning on doing 4 iterations, it'd be nice to know which of the epics will go into the iterations.
• Dan: One of the first tasks is turning stories into tasks. Also, note that epics may span iterations.

Prep for first iteration (Jonathan):

• Q: What do we need to do for this?
• Dan: Need epics defined by then.
• Jonathan: Can we use "DfR User Stories Scope" document as input to that process?
• Dan: They're close, I think so.
• Chris: Can we put stuff in Google Docs into the wiki as it solidifies? Makes it easier to share w/partners.
• ACTION: Jonathan will do this with the DfR User Stories Scope doc.
• Dan: Suggest that everybody have a guesstimate in mind for Epics to talk about next week.
• Bill: Is someone going to pull the Epics out of the Google docs?
• Dan: ACTION: All: Create Epics relating to things you've been doing research on. 'Till the end of the grant. A dozen is too many. (Brad agrees). Also, Brad and Dan will meet (but not this week) to go through the Epics and validate them.

Misc:

• Andrew: Will be out for a few days soon, back Weds if Comcast goes live on time.