2022-03-24 Product Council Meeting Notes

Date

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Attendees

Goals

Discussion items

TimeItemWhoNotes
5 minAnnouncementsJesseNone.
30 mins Updates Chairs/Leads

Community Council - Kirstin

  • Last update to PC was Feb. 24, 2022 - this update summarizes the CC meetings Feb. 28 + March 14, 2022
  • CC continued to work on a letter to the FOLIO members to reflect on the recent situation on resources and FOLIO's state of the art
    • Work is nearly finished now
    • Letter was translated to Chinese
  • Review of the MoUs – second draft: to be sent out in April. It has an adjusted membership fee structure.

New FOLIO members – waiting for MoU’s:

    • Technical University of Munich 
    • CRL (Center for Research Libraries)
    • University Library FAU Nürnberg-Erlangen 
  • New  FOLIO website: planned  publication date in mid April
  • Report from treasurer:  AWS costs will increase significantly – needs to be balanced by membership fees
  • WOLFCon agenda planning – work in progress: volunteers welcome: https://openlibraryfoundation.org/about/wolfcon/upcoming/
  • Community Council Meetings are in general open to participants!  Next will be on March 28, 2022

Technical Council 

  • TC technical reviews
    • Accepted UI for administering MARC authorities, plugin for "find fund"
    • Translation app: see below
  • Subgroups
    • Translations subgroup formed to do architecture review of translation mechanisms:
      • back-end static translation architecture
      • translation of library-customized messages at run-time (Translation app)
      • Separate but related reviews, plan to use RFC process for feedback
    • Controlling AWS costs: AWS costs have increased dramatically, beyond budget, group formed to look at ways to limit costs
    • Technical documentation/New developer onboarding: Some initial review has happened, subgroup forming
    • New Module Tech Evaluation: Refining acceptance criteria and process language to be more clear
    • Technical Evaluation Process: reviving/refining previous RFC process, gathered feedback from devs, will test out with some current FOLIO technical decisions

Product Owners

  • POs are focused on Lotus Bugfest and addressing reported issues.  Lotus Release Dashboard: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=11847
  • PO meetings have focused on 
    • Hotfix workflow updates 
    • Bugfest: the team managing the bugfest environment has changed, and there have been some growing pains and learning in the team related to this.
    • Information for POs to define requirements related to data load >  Performance and Scalability requirements overview and checklist
    • Information for POs for how teams can conduct: 1.) Functional data load testing (e.g., attaching more than one note or record to better simulate real-world conditions); 2.) API performance tests (asking developers to consider performance as part of their designs); and 3.) when to submit performance test requests to the PTF team - Types of tests
15 minCapacity Planning Team RolesJesse
FOLIO Capacity Planning originally came about in 2019 when the focus was on the FOLIO MVP to coordinate the developer resources to make that happen. The FOLIO Capacity Planning Team charge drafted a new charge a few months ago:

The Capacity planning team exists mainly as a service to POs and the overall FOLIO project to provide and recommend in the following areas:

    The FOLIO release process

    Define and plan releases and deadlines for both full named releases and hot fixes

    Provide recommendations for “Go” and “No-Go” decisions 

    Support PO's in helping decide if a defect has reached a level of severity to make it into a hotfix

    Identify problem areas that must be addressed relating to a release or the overall release process while also suggesting solutions

    Support PO's having capacity issues and helping suggest improvements

    Help drive the community feature ranking process and suggest improvements to make that process more useful to FOLIO Product Owners

    Help place new developers contributed to FOLIO on teams that can make use of their skillsets

Much of the work of capacity planning has moved to the Technical Council (criteria for adding apps, for instance).  Capacity planning works with product owners and the release team to determine when a release is ready and whether hotfixes are needed.  They also help with moving developers and code responsibility around as people come in and leave teams and help assign new developers to existing teams.  Historically, capacity planning also helped drive the process of ranking features.  There are not many community developers left on the project, so that role has decreased significantly.

Recognizing the changing needs, this spreadsheet shows a possible distribution of roles and responsibilities (Cap Planning team centric) with the capacity planning group turning into a release planning group.

When thinking about release planning, the existing capacity planning group looks at the functionality that product owners are planning for each release and shape the general size and scope of releases.

Capacity Planning has not had an elected member of the Product Council on it, and that seems odd.  In reformulating this into the release planning team, it would be good to address this.  (Two people that are on the capacity planning group now are also elected members of Technical Council.)  Sharon Wiles-Young, Martina Schildt, and Jesse Koennecke volunteered to sit in on the finalization of the group charter. The group meets at 9am Eastern U.S. time every other Monday.

5 minFuture meeting topics:JessePrioritization Process WG update (Tentative: March 31)

Zoom chat log

00:08:58	Kristin Martin:	Just put it in chat.
00:11:06	Kirstin Kemner-Heek:	I meant: registration will hopefully soon be open to WOLFCon - I'm sorry!
00:13:28	Kirstin Kemner-Heek:	https://openlibraryfoundation.org/about/wolfcon/upcoming/
00:24:11	Harry:	The FOLIO Capacity Planning Team charge
The Capacity planning team exists mainly as a service to POs and the overall FOLIO project to provide and recommend in the following areas:
	The FOLIO release process
	Define and plan releases and deadlines for both full named releases and hot fixes
	Provide recommendations for “Go” and “No-Go” decisions 
	Support PO's in helping decide if a defect has reached a level of severity to make it into a hotfix
	Identify problem areas that must be addressed relating to a release or the overall release process while also suggesting solutions
	Support PO's having capacity issues and helping suggest improvements
	Help drive the community feature ranking process and suggest improvements to make that process more useful to FOLIO Product Owners
	Help place new developers contributed to FOLIO on teams that can make use of their skillsets
00:24:32	Kristin Martin:	I hate to miss this discussion, but I will need to go
00:29:03	Mike Gorrell:	https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vvDiqP4wZOQN6L7ULgbJ9y_-JEhYeXIGjmmTFx1Yd_Q/edit#gid=0
00:31:43	Zak Burke:	I need to drop for another meeting.
00:40:45	Owen Stephens:	I think that’s the crux of the question - what makes those things “important” - what’s the criteria?
00:41:09	Owen Stephens:	An alternative way of planning releases would be to have absolute deadlines and just release what’s available at that point
00:43:14	Harry:	Owen, in general, that is exactly what we try to do.  However, sometimes due to dependencies, it  can get more complicated.
00:52:57	Peter Murray:	The new Alabama team ("Bama") working on the Calendar app is a good example of what Harry was describing.
00:58:53	Mike Gorrell:	Currently we meet at 9am on Mondays
00:59:05	Mike Gorrell:	Yes - every other week
01:14:28	Khalilah Gambrell:	Thanks Jesse.