Yellow Squad Weekly Topics: December 14

Summary:

• Makyo: the GUI can break the charm
• bcsaller: Write user stories as functional tests: improv plus Selenium
• bcsaller: card velocity improving
• gary_poster: run the tests before landing, or, we are not as good as an automatic tester
• gary_poster: teknico is "documentation daddy"
• bcsaller and Makyo: proliferation of ENV=1 make [target] rules
• goodspud: what do we do with the juju-gui charm in the gui?

Yellow Squad Weekly Project Report: December 14

We are working on the Juju GUI.

This week

• Very good interaction with design team
• Improved team velocity after deceleration last week
• Real users are starting to trickle in

We have had some very positive interactions with the design team. We have dug up some good data, requirements, and decisions together, and we've increased our dialog. They have been very responsive to what we need in the short term, and are thinking creatively and practically about the long term future directions.

Our velocity has picked back up somewhat. We feel it, and an analysis of kanban board data shows it. In November, we had an average cycle time--the time from when we start a card to the time we get it landed in the trunk, including reviews and review responses--of about three days. Last week, we popped up to five, and then six days. This week, we started decreasing again, down to a five-day cycle time. Five days is still far from ideal, and arguably affected in part by some quick-fix branches that we got through the board, but we also see signs of improvement individually. Hopefully this represents a continuing trend to get us back down to a three-day cycle time.

The week ended nicely with a couple of GUI charm users getting support on IRC.

New project: Juju GUI

Welcome back! We've been away working in secret for awhile. Our work is open now, so our retrospective notes are too.

Our current project is a web-based GUI for Juju. Juju lets you deploy connected services to the cloud in a convenient, vendor-neutral, and powerful way. The GUI lets you visualize and manage your work (see also another blog; a demo of our trunk, which is reset every 15 minutes; and the project itself). We've been working together with the Cloud Ecosystem Development team at Canonical on the project, with Kapil Thangavelu as the technical architect.

At the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit, we got feedback, had user tests, sprinted, and made plans. Right now, we are working to make it easy for anyone using Juju to deploy the GUI. We also have a refactoring of the environment view in progress.

We've had a lot of project meetings before the release. I published those notes internally. Since we open-sourced, I've been swamped. We've had a number of meetings, and I have a pretty big backlog of decisions to record.

Therefore, to get back in the swing of things, the rest of this post will be a record of decisions and hints from the the past few meetings. That will catch us up, and we can proceed from there at the next meeting with notes more like what I've given in the past--both project status notes and decisions and hints, with the decisions hopefully better grouped so you can find what interests you more easily.