Yellow Squad Wiki Home

https://launchpad.net/~yellow/+mugshots

Slogan for public consumption: Go go Golden Horde!

Slogan when we feel tired: Go go Yellow Banana Slugs!

Current projects are LEP/ParallelTesting and LEP/LaunchpadSetupScripts.

Daily call checklist

First part: Where are we right now?

• Review Done Done cards. For each card...
  • congratulate
  • ask the people if collaboration information is recorded correctly on the card.
  • ask the people who implemented it one or two questions about the implementation experience (e.g., what was the toughest part of getting this card done? how did you solve [that thing I heard about]? did something really work just as you'd hoped when you implemented this card?)
  • ask the people who implemented it if there is anything we should know about it (e.g., it changes how we do something, it unblocks some cards, etc.)
  • Move the card to "Weekly review"
• Review cards in deployment. Have any of them been in deployment for more than 24 hours? If so, problem solve (e.g., ask for details, ask if collaboration would help, and ask if anything else would help).
• Review cards in slack.
  • Have any of them been active for more than 24 hours? If so, suggest dividing them up.
  • Are any of them new? If so and pertinent, have we determined who the maintainer will be (Launchpad, yellow, or personal) and started down the proper design path?
• Review Active cards in "Multi-branch work"
  • Have any of them been in the same lane for more than 24 hours? If so, problem solve. If the developers are stuck, consider "convening a panel"
  • Have any of them been in the same lane for more than 48 hours? If so, strongly encourage collaboration. Pull people off other active cards if necessary.
• Review Miscellaneous Done cards. Ask for comments. Afterwards, move all to Weekly review.
• Review Miscellaneous Active cards. Ask for comments. If non-recurring card is sitting for longer than 24 hours, problem solve.
• Do any non-done cards on the board have deadlines? If so, review as necessary.
• Review all blocked cards everywhere. Are any of them unblocked? Do we need to take action to unblock any of them?

• [experimental] Make sure that, if anyone collaborated or communicated externally (according to our definitions) since the last time we talked, you "entered into the webapp" (sent an email to Gary about it).

Second part: what are we going to do?

• Review cards waiting to be done.
  • Do we have any critical cards?
  • How are we doing on our weekly (high) cards?
  • Does it at least look like we have cards ready to be started?
• Circle around the team. For each person...
  • Encourage but do not require each person to mention what card they plan to work on for the next 24 hours
  • Ask the person to mention any items that everyone should know: remind people of reduced availability, request help such as code reviews or pair requests, etc.

Panel requests

Unsticking panel checklist

• Take note of when the panel starts / set an alarm for T+20.
• Describe problem avoiding mentioning your own (stuck) solutions and ask for solutions and approaches.
• If that fails, describe your own solution and ask for solutions and ideas.
• If the panel has taken longer than 20 minutes, stop. Arrange for a pair programming or consultation as necessary.
• If no-one has said anything other than filler for three minutes, stop. Arrange for a pair programming or consultation as necessary. Consider rotation.

Pair programming observer checklist

• Be actively skeptical.
• Watch the other person's back.
• Be a planner: actively propose plans to tackle problems
• Offer to be a "navigator," keeping the destination in mind while the "driver" handles the details.
• When something doesn't make sense, this is a trigger for both parties to check assumptions and step back.

Weekly review call checklist

• Briefly review where we are in project plan.

• Review "topics for next", below

• Any new tricks learned?
  • Collaboration tricks?
  • Debugging tricks?
  • Communication tricks?
  • Checklists? Processes?
• Any nice successes?
  • Can you attribute your success to anything beyond the innate brilliance of yourself and your coworkers?
• Any pain experienced?
  • Prompts to ask people about:
    • (benji/gary) get subcommand
  • Questions to ask:
    • Are there any cards that are/were taking too long to move?
      • Are they blocked?
      • Are we spinning our wheels?
      • How long is too long?
    • Are we not delivering value incrementally?
    • Are we not collaborating?
    • Did we duplicate any work?
    • Did we have to redo any work?
      • Did we misunderstand the technical requirements, the goal, or a process?
      • Was the ordering of tasks that we chose broken?
  • Can we learn from it?
    • Checklist?
    • Experiment?
    • Another process change?
• Other topics
  • Weekly feedback loop for collaboration?

Topics for next

Writing a LEP checklist

• Describe the idea to one or more people in the squad to vet and refine it.
• Write up the LEP.

• Get at least one person in the squad to review it, especially if you are tired of it .

• Announce the LEP for broader review.

Starting a project checklist

• Prototype (no tests). Consider competing prototypes.
• Have a squad discussion about lessons learned and design decisions.

• Review CreatingNewProjects to get everything started properly. Also see jml's document for further ideas on what to add to this checklist.

• Begin coding with TDD.

Depending on another developer or team checklist--someone new or with past delivery problems

• Doublecheck whether you can't do it yourself somehow, or get someone with proven cross-team delivery ability.
• Are you depending on a person or a team? If it is a person, consider trying to escalate it to the manager, to make it a team goal, or at least something with team visibility and managerial approval and encouragement.
• If they need something from you, ask what format they want it in in order to be able to process your request as quickly as possible.
• A corollary to the previous one: make sure that you are making the smallest request necessary and reasonable.
• While it is tempting, and sometimes necessary, to be flexible for interacting with busy people, if the work is worth doing, the sooner it is done, the more value you get from it. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that you will get no value from it. This is "lean" for our squad, and also for the company. Try to communicate this.
• Request a delivery date guess. Consider requesting that a call be scheduled on that date, either for handover or for reassessment. If there is a deadline for us, also bring this to the attention of the Launchpad manager (flacoste).
• If the delivery doesn't happen on the expected date, (on the scheduled call) ask for three things: a revised delivery date, another associated call, and a fallback plan. The fallback plan should be some reasonable remediation if the second delivery date fails. Also bring this to flacoste's attention, and discuss with him whether official escalation is appropriate.

jml also pointed out this checklist from Covey's Seven Habits.... You need to establish these things up-front:

1. Desired results [spend time here, include "when"]
2. Guidelines [what I'd call constraints]
3. Resources available [money, team, people]
4. Accountability [what measures, how often]

5. Consequences [natural ones & incentives]

We should also try to incorporate these ideas.

Slack project checklist

• The project should further Canonical in some aspect. Examples include making yourself a more valuable employee to Canonical (i.e., studying a technology that is important to the company), improving processes or tools for our squad or team, or building or improving something for another part of Canonical.
• Consider who you expect to maintain the project.
  • Yourself: Be skeptical of this, but if so, that's fine.

  • Our squad: discuss design with squad, and/or follow the prototype -> discuss -> code pattern we have for new projects

  • Our team: make a LEP, consult with team lead (flacoste), and get acceptance from TA (lifeless) and/or any other stakeholders identified
• Make a card for the task or tasks in the kanban board.