2021-03-09 Meeting Notes

Planning Process Proposal

Review of Pointing Exercise - still a lot of issues and questions brought up in Slack

Will start using for Kiwi

FOLIO Feature Prioritization

People are confused at how this will play out.  Would like to get approval on process today and take to Product Council this week.

Although the official ballot isn't ready, anyone can go in and look now.

There are ~400 features ranked R1 now, can't get to that many.

1st goal - want to know what the top priorities are

2nd goal - everyone knows what is in the plan and why

Process:

Holly will announce 2-week voting period, then release the ballot, after the voting period is closed the ballot will be closed, results will be documented in the wiki, have a retrospective, and find out what issues came up.

Paula - Texas A&M ran a first pass at this process, came up with 15 features to distribute points across.  One person liked the new point system, one person did not, and didn't get any other comments.  There was some confusion about Iris and Juniper features being labeled "R1" and "R2", people thought those were ranks for certain features.  I renamed them "Iris" and "Juniper."

Holly - trying to get people to use the flower names

There was general discussion about the confusion between flower names and numbered releases, which makes it difficult for the SMEs and staff to even know what release they're on, which hotfix is meant, etc.

Paula - are we still supposed to rank the individual features? 

Holly - yes, institutions use these for their own purposes.  To get into the spreadsheet she only pulls features that are ranked R1 or R2.

Debra H - will we use this beyond Kiwi?

Holly - yes, but will likely make changes after the restrospective.

Debra - how does this fit into overall governance?  Are the POs weighing in?  What about the new roadmap process?  How does it all fit together?

Holly - some of the roadmap group are coming to Cap Plan next week to talk about some of these issues.  Roadmap is high level, this is dealing with details.

Kelly - this process is a way for the implementing libraries to indicate their priorities, it doesn't dictate anything because there are so many competing needs

Debra - thought we did this already with R1-R5 rankings and adding showstopper designations

Holly - showstoppers can get out of control and was meant for those about to implement

Kelly - we still end up with too many showstoppers and have limited development capacity

Ian - we made the trade off a long time ago for less functionality for an early go-live schedule, folks thought it was more important to get FOLIO into production than to have it 'complete' first

Holly - there were 6 showstoppers in trouble in Iris

AMB- And the MOST valuable thing that libraries can do is contribute development resources, if you have them. We've seen several libraries contributing an extra developer for features critical to them, e.g. acquisitions, EDIFACT invoices, MARC searching. That is incredibly helpful to not only the devs and the POs, but libraries anxiously awaiting the additional functionality

Holly - back to the POs, they will look at the highly-pointed features and will look to see if they're ready to be worked on, are there prerequisites?  Ex: what if Inventory has 10 features but the dev team can't complete those 10?  Will try to shuffle people around, may have to thin-thread some features, etc. The POs still have a very active role, and all still want to work on what the community needs

Tod - Ex - For Chicago, here's what we'd like to see in a specific release, which would still be institutional priorities

Holly - we need to try this and document what works and what doesn't

Holly - devs work at 40% new features, 40% bugs/fixes, 20% tech debt.  This process only addresses the 40% of new feature capacity

AMB - maybe put the 40-40-20 split on the prioritization pages

Holly - want to finalize tomorrow, please put any remaining questions issues in Slack, tag Holly

Still working on the Juniper release but the Juniper dashboard is up and can see what each team will be working on.  Holly hopes it will be firmed up by the end of the week.

Currently have 59 features planned, as opposed to 80-90 that we usually have.

Dashboard: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=11800

Receiving workflow demos deferred until Honeysuckle -