The OMERO Development Process

As decided at the May meeting in Dundee, the OMERO team is going to test a new development process loosely based on Agile and XP methods. Stories, tasks, and defects (our ticket_types) will be entered into trac as necessary. These will be scheduled into cycles, each of which consists of six iterations (a two week period). After each bi-weekly period, we will schedule user-supplied stories, developer supplied tasks, and outstanding defects to the upcoming iteration during the review meeting.

A Task is a developer item (a "Todo") that will be scheduled by the developer for technical reasons. Stories and defects are scheduled jointly to a particular milestone (cycle & iteration) and will always be closed by a successful Test.

Tests should be of the Acceptance Test form. The ticket number for which a test is being written should be added in the  testng annotations (@Test( groups = "ticket:60" )). This works at either the method level (see SetsAndLinksTest#L73) or the class level (see UniqueResultTest#L15).

If for any reason, a developer can't fulfill the assigned stories/tasks for an iteration, ... that's ok. It's two weeks, right? But by raising a flag, we can get a feeling for our planning strategy. During the next iteration, we should take that into account.

General Notes

• Review meetings are a learning process.
• Use views like {9} and {13} to get a feeling for what's going on.
• Broad items can be left scheduled to the cycle.
• Backlogged items are rescheduled.
• The articulation of stories is critical; not too big, not too little.
• Bigger stories can be left at the cycle level.
• But, usually a story should be a testable piece of functionality.
• Also, usually a stakeholder should write the story in order to push it forward.

Review Meetings How To

• Before Meeting
  • Try to close everything, or explain why still open.
  • Review unscheduled and upcoming (next iteration) tickets.
  • Move unscheduled tickets to cycle where sensible.
  • Move cycle-unscheduled tickets to next iteration where sensible.
• Scheduling
  • Discuss what new came out of the closed tickets.
  • Discuss why open tickets are open.
  • Evaluate how well the previous iteration was planned.
  • Move backlog (unfinished tickets) to next iteration or unschedule.
  • Move other tickets to next iteration
  • If next iteration is too full, prioritize and reschedule.
• After Meeting
  • Place review notes at  http://trac.openmicroscopy.org.uk/omero/milestone/<your-cycle-here>

Future directions

It's possible that we add time estimates to the trac tickets and beginning measuring our velocity. Currently, there is no way to do this in trac.