<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div>I think I understood Terry's buckets to be:<br><br></div><ol><li>Keep the lights on and servers running, assuming nothing external impacts them.</li><li>Respond to external events, such as security patches and library upgrades. </li><li>Innovation. </li></ol></div></div>I believe DStrine recently created an "Unplanned" tag in phabricator, which certainly sounds related. In that case, I believe the definition was "Work we added to this sprint after this sprint started." Which seems like an entirely reasonable definition, for teams doing timeboxed iterations as in Scrum. <br><br></div>I think my existing discomfort with the conversations so far about "interrupt" work boils down to not knowing if it is "unplanned" work, "externally triggered" work, or "not part of our long-term goals" work. Or some combination of those. <br><br><div><div><br><br></div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><span><font color="#888888"><br>Kevin Smith<br>Agile Coach<br>Wikimedia Foundation<br><br></font></span><br><font><font><i><font color="#888888">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.<br></font></i></font></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 11:31 AM, Joel Aufrecht <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jaufrecht@wikimedia.org" target="_blank">jaufrecht@wikimedia.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><div></div>I'm working on a definition of "interrupt" work that we could standardize and measure across the Foundation. The purpose is to inform planning; in particular, we probably have a lot of teams thinking they can, or being asked to, complete a certain amount of new work, without fully taking into account the amount of maintenance work that will continue arriving.<br><br></div><div>I'm starting by collecting information and opinions. Here's what I have:<br><br></div><div>1) Terry has three buckets, but I don't have their exact names or definitions<br><br></div><div>2) I've been thinking roughly, "work that has to be done to maintain existing products and services at their current level of functionality/performance/success".<br><br></div><div>2a) The question of "success" is interesting; if a product starts losing market share, is work to keep market share up "interrupt"? I think it isn't, and the "output vs outcome" divide applies here. If the output (a service being available) breaks, fixing that is interrupt, but if an output becomes less popular, making it more appealing is not interrupt.<br><br></div><div>2b) What about patching and upgrades? Is a patch "interrupt", but an upgrade to support a new version of Windows not?<br></div><div><br></div><div>3) Some notion of planned vs unplanned? Is the essence of interrupt work that it's unplanned? Or are "maintenance work" and "unplanned work" distinct; it just happens that a much bigger percentage of maintenance work is unplanned compared to new-functionality work?<br></div><div><br></div><div>4) Is there any definition from MPL work?<br><br></div><div>5) Are any teams other than VE experimenting with this distinction in their backlogs?<br><br></div><div>(Tracking: <a href="https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T107824" target="_blank">https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T107824</a>)<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br></font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><div><br></div><div><div><div><div><div><div dir="ltr"><font color="#888888"><div><b>Joel Aufrecht<br></b></div><div>Team Practices Group<b><br></b></div><div>Wikimedia Foundation<br></div></font></div></div></div>
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