On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:44 PM, Guillaume Lederrey <guillaume.lederrey@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2. Phabricator
>
> We would create  a Discovery-ops-sprint project/board, which will represent
> the work of the Discovery ops team. This aligns with how we have handled the
> Maps and WDQS sub-teams, which are also very small teams.

If 90% of my work is going to be search related at first, I'd actually
prefer to keep that in the Discovery-Search-Sprint [1]. I think this
would provide better visibility on what the search team is doing as a
whole, and if it all make sense, my tasks should more or less strongly
related to the other tasks of the search team. It would at least push
me a bit more to see what the rest of the team is doing.

In any case, we'll see as it goes and iterate to make it better.

I think you have convinced me. Not only will most of your work initially be with the search team, but you will be taking over duties that search team members have been responsible for. So by leaving that work on the search board, people like Erik and David would be able to see it, comment on it, review it, and even take it on if/when that would make sense.

Some explanation of my bias: My experience is that a shared Kanban is
a very nice tool to transform push people to work as a team and not as
a collection of individuals. I have used Kanban for quite sometime to
push team objectives forward and not individual performance (if this
specific task is not my strong area, but it is what needs doing now,
I'll do it because it's the next task in the backlog). The approach
optimizes lead time / flow at the cost of cycle time / throughput.

Pure Kanban would definitely expect each person to pull the next task, whether or not they were best suited to do so. Our teams (like many) have people with a variety of skills, so it's usually more efficient to have people take the next task in their domain. Essentially, we have been operating closer to Scrum than Kanban that way.

At some point, we might have to choose to go more strongly toward Kanban, or toward Scrum. Our current middle ground was easy to get started, but probably isn't optimal.

Thanks for sharing your ideas!


Kevin Smith
Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation