How are Project Mgmt activities done here?

#1

I am curious as to how the manageIQ community and development team inside Red Hat do Project Mgmt / Requirements gathering for this project.

So far, I have seen some bugs and feature requests start here in the talk forum, and then migrate to github issues and then be handled there until they either go into code or the issue is closed. Also there is a trello board, which I rather like, but I have not had time yet to understand what it holds. So I guess I would say that it appears that ‘requirements’ are held in various places at various times. I know that agile and open source projects often do this different and this is fine.

I guess my real question is: how is product/project mgmt done? like priority, severity, impact, and then deciding what tasks/requirements/bugs/whatever are done by who and when - how is it decided which bugs to work on first and when they are due etc?

Does the manageIQ team have standup or weekly bug meetings of any kind? I know we did that at my last (semi) open source company, Zenoss. Are there formal product managers that interact at the community as well as product level?

Thanks!

#2

PS: To give some context, I am hoping to use the manageIQ community as a sample for students use in classrooms when learning about open source communities. I know that the open sourcing of this community is relatively new, and that the answer may not be “community-ideal”, and that is fine. I have so far been impressed by the open development tools and methods ive seen occur here over the last 1.5 yrs.

#3

Hey @nyeates! First of all, very interested in how you are using this in a classroom. Please keep us posted on that.

As the Scrum Master of ManageIQ, I can answer some of your questions. Based on your post, it sounds like you are somewhat familiar with Scrum Methodology and Agile Principles. I do want you to know, also, that we are constantly adapting this process and our tools-- we value the relationships among all the parties over the process, and sometimes process needs to change!

Where do our “requirements” come from? Stakeholders - they can come from anywhere. The community can open issues in Github.

How do we set priorities? Discussions among product owner, product manager.

Once we have priorities, that’s where you’ll start to see things show up on our Trello boards, usually starting with the ManageIQ Roadmap board. Github issues get opened based on tasks that need to be acted upon to meet the requirements. We try to link the GitHub issue to the Trello card. Or, you will see a Trello card linked to a subboard.

Following the Scrum methodology, we have daily standups and a sprint review every three weeks. The Sprint Reviews can be found on our Sprint Reports YouTube channel. In addition, we have sprint planning every three weeks and a quick retrospective. The development managers meet weekly to discuss but priorities, too.

I hope that helps.

1 Like
#4

Thanks @marigold2048 for the additional info. Very helpful. I especially like the Sprint Reviews in video. Wow, very impressed. I hope those are kept going. Even though they don’t get a ton of views, even 30 or 100 is expansive when you consider your audience.

I am making a learning activity located here: http://foss2serve.org/index.php?title=Requirements_Analysis
It is a work in progress.
I will not actually take it into a classroom myself. I am part of Red Hat’s University Outreach team and I am making some teaching materials for teachers to be able to easily pick up and run with in their classrooms.

Add-on question: When you set priorities, is the logic and reasoning behind these decisions posted to the community? When I was at Zenoss, we did not, and it led to misunderstandings & frustration in the community.

This community is proving to be a great resource for learning! Thanks.