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?