This week, we are shifting how the Search and Discovery team(s) track the work we are doing. The existing Search-Team phab project will become our "Product Backlog". That's the collection of all the ideas, features, bug reports, and other possible tasks that we might eventually take on. As the Product Owner, Dan will pretty much live in that board, figuring out the relative priorities of all the possible tasks.

We will be creating a "sprint workboard" for each sub-team. Despite using the word "sprint", we are not switching to time-boxed iterations (e.g. 2-week sprints). But the boards serve the same purpose: Each sprint workboard will track current work, plus work scheduled for the next week or two. Anything outside that scope will stay in the product backlog. They will have some variation of TODO, In Progress, and Done columns. As you work on, and then complete tasks, you will move those tasks across the board. I think most if not all of you are already familiar with that style of task tracking.

We are creating a sprint workboard for each of the "subteams": Cirrus, Wikidata Query Service, OpenStreetMap, UX, and Research-and-Data.

A side effect of using the sprint extension of phab is that tasks will now have a "Story Points" field. That field is intended to hold an estimate, but you can just ignore it for now. Perhaps at some point we'll have discussions about whether to start doing estimates, but not yet.

Why are we doing this?

As a developer, this will allow you to focus your attention on just one workboard, that is specific to your area of work. (Unless you happen to do work in two different sub-teams, in which case you'll have to bounce between two small workboards).

As a product owner, Dan will be able to see each subteam's status at a glance. Later, when we have more product managers, they will probably focus on one or two subteams each, and they will be able to focus their attention on just the relevant board(s).

Nik will let developers know when he has moved their current and near-future work into the sprint workboards, along with the exact name of the workboard(s) you'll be working in.

We still have an open TODO item of dealing with all the existing search-related phab projects. Many of them will probably be archived, after merging their contents into the new structure, but that hasn't been fully worked out yet.

Feel free to ask me any questions about this, either on the list or off.

Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation

*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make it a reality.*