2022-03-31 Product Council Meeting notes

Announcements

New FOLIO members:

• Technical University Munich: TUM

• FAU University Library Nuremberg-Erlangen

Product Council election updates

Elections are to occur in April.  Current members are letting.

WOLFcon Pacific Conference—all are welcome to attend.

Priorities for FOLIO Development 

Flow chart

Tasked by Product Council to create a new process for prioritizing the development of new features.

Workflow overview: institutions add requests as Jira issues. Product Owners review to close if duplicate and go back to the requester for new information. Product Owners can decide to bypass the SIGs if needed.  SIGs prioritize what they want to work on based on their own criteria. SIG (or working group) adds user stories and further information. The SIG votes on ranking. The Product Owner can adjust rankings if needed.  The Product Owner would send it to the institutions for ranking (or bypass to go directly to developers if warranted).  Institutions would vote on features using a tool outside of Jira (yet to be determined).  PO, SIG, and Institutional rankings would be combined into a final ranking to determine which release will include the feature.

The SIG has a voice in voting in addition to institutional ranking.

So far we have avoided having institutions put information directly into Jira; institutions typically go to Product Owners now.

Clarification that this process "ranks" not "votes" on feature development.  Ranking doesn't necessarily mean that a development team is available to take on feature development.  Having the ranked list of features helps when new development resources come to the project to say where development teams would be useful.  This flow chart process takes some of the burdens off Product Owners and put them on SIGs to do some of the pre-development work.

The task group can take this information back and develop a prioritization process for development teams.

Historically, the implementer's group has also provided rankings and at times have overridden rankings in Jira. The Implementers Group needs to be added as a point of consideration as well.  Jira would have PO and SIG rankings; institutional ranking handled outside Jira, and the final ranking put into Jira.  Having POs or SIGs tie feature development to a particular release (instead of a rank order) is not as helpful as the ranked prioritization.

Bug-handling may bypass this process or could be added to this process.   The bypass path offers discretion for product owners when needed and appropriate.

The voting process hasn't been determined and would be discussed at a future meeting.  A joint PO/SIG-Convener meeting would work through the details and recorded for later viewing.

Forcing an institution to pay to have a voice in institutional rankings can be harmful to the project.  If the dues paid to FOLIO are funding specific developers, then the priorities of dues-paying members are useful for determining what FOLIO-funded developers are doing.  Institutions active in the SIGs are already shaping the nature of features, and institutions are encouraged to take up responsibility for features that are important to them and gather input and resources from others to get the development to completion.

Next steps: the group is seeking additional feedback (including comments on the slides).  The task group will prepare an additional presentation on tools and a refinement of the process.  Feedback is due in three weeks, with the group coming back to Product Council a week after.

The weeks of April 14 and 21 (the weeks around Easter) are extended holidays for some, so those PC meetings are canceled.  We will move the SIG update meeting to April 7.  SIG Convener Update document for that meeting on April 7.)

For a future meeting, making plans for WOLFcon. The next FOLIO WOLFcon planning meeting is Friday, April 27th.