[asterisk-dev] Project Planning Template

[Matthew Jordan]

On 11/03/2012 08:20 AM, Dan Jenkins wrote:
> Hi Matt,
> 
> Unfortunately I wasn't at AstriDevCon and I'm not entirely sure how you
> currently manage the different projects that go into major releases; but
> we utilise Jira heavily at my place of work and it seems like you could
> too (outside of just making jiras and working on them). Firstly, the
> wiki page in Confluence is a great "human readable" overview of what the
> project is, what it aims to do, what's going to be involved and so I'd
> absolutely keep that; but it seems like you'd want more within Jira
> itself - for the people working directly on the project.
> 
> Firstly, this process seems like a lot of work (and I wasn't a fan when
> we changed over to this), but it really does help and makes the team
> working on the project very clear on what needs doing, what the
> requirements are etc.
> 
> When we get a project in, we get a list of requirements with it - this
> comes in the form of an "Epic" jira, which has a list of requirements
> within it.
> 
> We, as developers, break these requirements down into chunks of work
> called "stories", each story is a deliverable - this would maybe be a
> little different for you, but i can imagine a story would be "construct
> AMI events", "construct AGI" and so on. Stories are high level bits of work.
> 
> These stories get linked to the Epic as "fulfilled by" in Jira.
> 
> Then within each of these stories we break down everything that we need
> to do to complete that story. These are called "dev tasks" within our
> workflow and are sub tasks to the story within jira.
> 
> In the end you should have your Epic (with requirements), Stories which
> are linked to the epic (all your stories should complete your
> requirements) and then dev tasks which are sub tasks to the stories.
> 
> I'm not sure on the limitations of your Jira installation as I know
> Atlassian give different plans different functionality.
> 
> This would then allow you to make dashboards (if you wanted) for
> different projects; allowing people to glance at a project and really
> understand where everything is etc.
> 
> Like I said at the beginning, you might already be doing all of this
> within Jira; but I've had little experience of your workflows within
> Jira (only ever submitted bugs).
> 
> Am I telling you something you know about already?
> 

Yes and no :-)

So, historically, the ASTERISK project in Jira hasn't been used to plan
projects beyond patch attachment and discussion, so there are no
Epics/Stories.  While we could enable Epics/Stories in that project,
we've focused instead on making it useful for issue reporting/tracking.

That being said, as a fan of Agile methodology (which we use at Digium),
I'd love to use Epics/Stories in Jira.

There is, however, a difference between how we do software development
at Digium versus the Asterisk project as a whole.  Not every
organization (or individual!) that develops for Asterisk may follow that
process, and its difficult to mandate a software engineering process
(much less a requirements analysis/breakdown methodology) across
everyone that contributes to the project.  I'm hopeful that whatever
requirements documentation we ask folks to do for a major project is
generic enough that they can use it regardless of their organization's
development processes.

So, if a project decides to use User Stories, we may want to explore
enabling Epics/User Stories in the ASTERISK project and using a
{jiraissues} macro to document them on the Confluence page.  But if
someone likes Use Cases they can use those too - in the end, I'm happy
with anything that results in a minimum set of requirements getting
written down!

-- 
Matthew Jordan
Digium, Inc. | Engineering Manager
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at: http://digium.com & http://asterisk.org