WOLFCon submission deadline is today
Privacy SIG looking at reviving activities
Work in Product Council to collect SIG priorities.
Caitlin Stewart is working on a prototype: DRAFT Community Priorities
Not being very restrictive about what groups can submit
Priorities pulled from Acq SIG topics list based on number of votes
Which level of issue/feature to use? Probably avoid Epics.
Purple icons - Epics/Umbrellas - Larger; work that can’t be done in one release. Top level including multiple features
Yellow icons - Features - something that can be accomplished within a release
Blue icons - Stories (User story) - Breakdown of the work that needs to be done. Ideally can be finished in a Sprint (2 weeks).
UXPROD - Where all features and epics created
Other names
Bit of a moving target trying to figure out how big the thing is that’s being asked for.
Initially will create user story and then will add to a bucket. If it starts to align with work being pushed to do for other reasons, will look at it and start to refine. May begin to realize that it will actually be more work and is bigger than a user story. At that point may turn into a feature.
If story has story points assigned, has already been reviewed.
Story points should appear in details.
Cross apps has several epics because the work needs to be done across FOLIO.
Drafts may need to be fleshed out more if we want to make them a priority.
:20 - Statuses should tell you in a general sense where this thing is in the process
Estimates in details used for rough idea of how much work it will take
Owen Stephens 8:27 AM
I’m not convinced the Epics are generally needed tbh
Right at the start of a module / area of development they can be useful. But once you have a basic working module, then it is rare to have functionality added that is Epic in size
Epic in size would suggest it could only be realised across multiple releases. The release cycle is so long for FOLIO this is unusual
In a more typical agile product releases would be much more rapid, and so epics more useful
Maybe useful for bringing multiple teams together
A lot of POs use feature labels to organize. Epic is just another way of relating features together. Label does essentially the same thing and you can have multiple labels. Can only have one parent epic.
JIRA has also changed its approach here as well tbh. It now just calls them parent/child not epic
Could be helpful in surfacing overlap?
Challenge - having resource like this is only useful if folks are reviewing it.
Exporting is one of those areas where it probably is duplication of effort.
This is desired functionality - what people want to have happen
Filter that pulls in “In progress” features for a given area and also shows most desired. What’s being worked on and what the community really wants - would be an interesting comparison page as well.
Surfacing this is always going to be a good thing. In terms of how it actually informs outcomes - not entirely sure. Nature of FOLIO is that generally it comes down to individual apps to implement things. Can help in getting ahead of any later inconsistencies. Cross app - retroactively trying to achieve consistency, which is difficult.
Reality of situation on the ground - who will pay for this to get done? Will it get done in appropriate timeframe?
Have had people come and ask - what would be good features to work on? - What do we have that’s pretty well-defined?
Circumstances where this would be value.
Developers looking for something to work on.
Funding, but no specific functionality to work on
In combination with this, if SIG is working on refining those, might be more likely that those features are ready to be developed when someone comes along with funding.
Owen Stephens 8:44 AM
Different sizes of task are also really important. Some developments happen quickly and easily because they are quick and easy rather than because they are the most important. Especially the type of case that Dennis is talking about
Identifying good “bang for buck” tasks is always very useful IMO - I try to do this myself all the time as these tasks are the things that can be done easily in some gaps in other tasks
The addition of documents/URLs to agreement lines was an example of this in Sunflower
:46 - As FOLIO matures and grows, hope that we sometimes realize that other apps can do what is being requested. If lists can do something, do we need to put effort into doing it in Finance?
How do we surface as a group/community when a different app is already taking care of something being asked for in App A?
Dung-Lan Chen 8:49 AM
Second what Sara mentioned that making aware of something important that we should know about is very challenging!
Don’t think there’s really a magic bullet. More people attending various meetings - hopefully that’s part of the conversation. Make notes on stories. Close out? But also, maybe someone really wants it possible in Finance. Can we really stop that from happening?
Sara Colglazier 8:52 AM
I am not saying prevent, but then that should be a decision made with full knowledge of what is what already
One of the things touted, if you don’t like the way it works, can build it differently yourself.
Just because lists app exists, doesn’t mean it does anything specific. Has tools which can be leveraged for new functionality, but that new functionality takes work.
We spend time discussing Acq SIG topics which is essentially filling the backlog. Could probably spend more time as an Acq SIG refining our backlog to contribute to this effort. Work of refining stories is tough to do, but maybe somewhere we should be looking more closely. Update and keep backlog clean.