features and percentages [was Re: RFC: Feature process improvements]

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 09:39:03PM -0500, John Dulaney wrote:
> a feature, especially a crit path feature, is not ready for prime time. 
> Obviously, if a feature is not %100 by feature freeze, then it needs to be
> dropped.  I would even venture to suggest that we include in the SOP
> something along the lines of "If feature is not 80% by point X (X being two
> weeks prior to freeze), then FESCo should at that point evaluate enacting
> the fall back."

I don't think percent-complete is very helpful. The numbers are often
completely arbitrary, and even if they are actually accurate to that project
hard to compare in a relative sense. 80% of a small feature may be far
closer to complete than 99% of a major one.

I like burndown charts. Low overhead, easily read, and generally more
concrete than guesses at percentage done. I wonder if there's a way we can
easily provide a widget in the wiki for keeping them up to date. This:
http://joel.inpointform.net/software-development/burn-down-charts-tutorial-simple-agile-project-tracking/
has a decent Google Docs template, but we wouldn't want to make that
requirement for our process.



-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>