4.4 Sprint Planning

Gregory Szorc gregory.szorc at gmail.com
Thu Sep 14 01:16:20 EDT 2017


On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 2:22 AM, Ryan McElroy <rm at fb.com> wrote:

> Greetings Mercurial Community!
>
> As hopefully everyone is aware, the 4.4 sprint (https://www.mercurial-scm.
> org/wiki/4.4sprint) is coming up in two and a half weeks. Please make
> sure you have copied your name from the "Availability" list to the
> "Attendance" list if you are planning on coming (currently our confirmed
> numbers are about half of those a year ago in Paris and I'll confirming
> numbers would also be awesome).
>
> As we have have learned from the past few sprints, a little bit of
> planning has helped us get the most out of these events. I wanted to
> propose a tentative schedule and solicit feedback now so we can hit the
> ground running when the sprint starts on Friday, September 29.
>
> Once we agree on a schedule that at least most of us are okay with, I’ll
> add it to the sprint wiki. Also, Kostia Balytskyi and I are volunteering to
> help organize the sprint on-the-ground (to help ensure we’re covering as
> much ground as possible during the three days of the sprint).
>
> # Proposed Schedule Draft
>
> ## Friday
> 9-10am arrive, get breakfast at FB office, mingle
> 10am-noon: Welcome and Status Updates
> * state of the community (updates from the steering committee)
> * state of the tooling (updates about the build bots and systems on
> mercurial-scm.org)
> * state of the code (updates on statistics about code contributions and
> code review)
> * state of hg at company X (BitBucket, Mozilla, Unity, Google, FB, etc)
> noon-1:00pm: lunch at FB cafeteria
> 1:00-3:00pm: breakout sessions on major topics, with notetakers in
> etherpad (will use wiki ideas to pre-seed)
> 3:00-3:30: break
> 3:30-5:30: breakout sessions continue
> 5:30: order Saturday breakfast
> 6:00-evening: dinner at FB office, enjoy Dublin, etc
>
> ## Saturday
> 9-10am: arrive, eat breakfast, mingle
> 10am: order lunch
> 10:30am-noon: Tech Talks – interesting project presentations (will have
> sign ups before and at sprint)
> noon-1:00pm: eat lunch
> 1:00-5:30 hackathon, fix some low-hanging bugs, implement some quick
> features, etc (needs reviewers!)
> 5:30: order Sunday breakfast
> 6:00-evening: dinner out in Dublin, enjoy the brisk Irish air, etc
>
> ## Sunday
> 9-10am: arrive, eat breakfast, mingle
> 10am: order lunch
> 10:30am-noon: Vision statements – directions we’d like to see mercurial go
> in the future (good idea?)
> noon-1:00pm: eat lunch
> 1:00-3:00pm: breakout sessions
> 3:00-3:30: break
> 3:30-5:30: breakout sessions
> 5:30-evening: freedom!
>
> Please help paint this bikeshed! All ideas will be considered.
>
> I’m looking forward to seeing many of you in a couple of weeks!
>

Thank you and Kostia for volunteering to organize things on the ground! The
sprints can be chaotic and I'm sure you'll make great masters-of-ceremony.

While the draft schedule seems very reasonable (I'd be happy if it were the
final schedule), I'd like to throw out a few ideas and observations.

Experience from previous Sprints tells me that people are pretty drained by
the 3rd day. I like the idea of a "vision statements" session to hash out
project direction. But I'm a bit worried about doing that on Sunday. If we
have the session, I'd prefer see it done on Friday or Saturday when
everyone is still pretty fresh. I /think/ it would make a natural follow-up
to the "state of" sessions. Maybe we could do it after lunch on Friday?
Although I do worry about information overload if we stack all the heavy
talking on Friday. It might also be useful for people to have time to
digest all the "state of" information and to connect with others before we
start thinking about vision statements.

Personally, I love when things get done at the Sprint. The best Sprints for
me are when I walk away feeling energized about what was accomplished.
Something I feel has been lacking from previous Sprints is a natural "book
end" to the event. Sundays can kind of tail off and fizzle. What do others
think about some kind of "closing" event where we announce accomplishments
and leave on a high note?

Another area I'd like to explore is establishing more formal goals or even
"tracks" for the Sprint - before the Sprint starts. It would be cool if by
the time I get on a plane I have a pretty good sense of what we're going to
try to do at the Sprint. For example, perhaps a few people sign up for
Python 3 porting, others on storage futures, another group on UX papercuts,
and another group on bug triage and fixing. Being a reviewer and patch
author, if I have time to "page in" areas that I know will be a focus at
the Sprint, it should enable me - and others - to have a more productive
Sprint.

Finally, I'd really like to make sure we address as many of the "only at
the Sprint" activities as we can. We tend to save many of our larger
backwards compatibility breaking decisions for Sprints. Going back to
knowing what will happen before the Sprint, if we could get a list of major
proposals on the wiki before the Sprint so everyone has time to digest them
and isn't surprised by the crazy ones, I think that would go a long way.

Thanks again for starting this thread, Ryan!
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