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

[Fabian Deutsch]

> 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.

I must say that the Ubuntu folks are distilling their bugzilla informations quite
well on http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-raring/ .
The good thing about this solution is, that bugzilla is (AFAIK) used to track the
progress of a feature - and using bugzilla could be also a doable to track
our features.

- fabian