QA » openQA Project

cdywan wrote:

Motivation¶

Regarding due dates I'm making two observations:

• Avoiding reminder emails can seem to take over and become more important than questions regarding the ticket itself. In the best case that's wasting time we should spend verifying tickets or finding better ways to solve them.
  • See https://suse.slack.com/archives/C02AJ1E568M/p1648715300694229

Agreed. It is of course more important to discuss about the actual problems and have value-adding discussions and decisions rather than shifting an arbitrary date selection around. I had already extended the wiki in the first entry of https://progress.opensuse.org/projects/qa/wiki/Tools#How-we-work-on-our-backlog . I hope that helps as well.
I suggest in our daily routines (daily meeting with daily moderator as fallback) to check on the queries of "what will exceed due date soon" and address those tickets. @Cris can you as Scrum Master try to ensure that on a daily base or should we add an explicit "daily moderation checklist" on the wiki?

• We're never quite in agreement if due dates warrant action after they run on, as they run out or perhaps a week early in case reminder emails are sent out.
  • The exceeding due date could be adjusted e.g. <= -1 days

This is based on the idea of separating the due-date both as "hint" as well as "alert".
I now changed the query from "due date in less than 0 days" to "due date more than 1 day ago". I tested with the ticket #109028 . As of today 2022-04-01 when setting the due-date to 2022-04-01 the previous query configuration flagged it as exceeding due date, now it does not flag it anymore. Setting the due-date to 2022-03-31 still flags it. So this gives one more day between "hit due-date" until we flag it as "exceeding due-date". Maybe that is enough to improve together with being more diligent on daily checks of "what will exceed due date soon".

• Days off regularly interfere with due dates.

I think we can improve here by looking at tickets from the team work perspective and proactively work on issues together before we run into due-dates. Of course, when "days off" are planned then the assignee themselves should ensure that the due-date is still reasonable to uphold.

sorry, wanted to be assignee myself when setting to "Feedback"

Discussed in the weekly unblock meeting 2022-04-13.

@cdywan please extend https://progress.opensuse.org/projects/qa/wiki/Tools#Periodic-backlog-refinement referencing the update+due-date forecast to be reviewed on a daily base. You can also add a note what the daily moderator and Scrum Master should ensure. But we should avoid to say "(only) the Scrum Master does this" or "(only) the Product Owner does this".

Let's conduct the experiment for the next two weeks to see if that helps us prevent running into tickets exceeding due-date. If not we need to extend the duties for daily moderation.

cdywan wrote:

I extended the page as suggested, will ask for feedback in chat before deciding if this should be resolved.

We talked about it in [last] week's retro and due dates seem to work well in tandem with the due date forecast and reminder emails can help remind team members of which ticket to check again.