Meeting Notes/2016-01-14 iOS Phlogiston

Joel, Josh, Max

Discussion
The three ways Phlogiston can track milestones: project, projectcolumn, milestone parent task.

Max: Do you use Mobile-App-Goals Phab board? Josh: no.

Josh: Columns don't seem to be supported very well e.g. for filtering. Prefer to use projects aka tags. Can use tags to query.

Joel: preview of forecasting chart from VE.

Josh: yeah, we want to bundle up our stuff into milestones and then estimate how long it's going to take.

Issue: If there is a master board and a working board, it is useful to know when tasks are on the working board. If tasks have to stay on the master board (and are also added to the working board), then there's no easy way to tell which ones are on the working board. Therefore, the guideline to keep all tasks on the master board is a problem. Phlogiston needs a way to find all of the tasks for a project, so it's good to have all tasks in one project; but, given this issue, it's fine to have all tasks in at least one of two projects.

Need a new board to realistically track iOS work.

Maintenance Fraction:
iOS has a lot of tagged WorkType tasks. No common shared definition for WMF, so no mandate to track (may revisit in February when Strategic Planning is due to clarify). iOS is currently tagging, but not all tasks get tagged, and iOS isn't using the data for anything. Possible definition: Maintenance is work that we wouldn't have to do if feature X or product X wasn't out. Could be useful for measuring "if we do Feature X, what permanent workload will we be assuming and how will that affect capacity", but that will take years to complete a measurement cycle. Josh: team/environment too volatile for this to be very helpful. Also, wolud have to have followup mechanism to spot untagged tasks and get them tagged.

Decision: stop tagging WorkType for now.

Changes to how iOS team is working in Phab
should see results in tomorrow's Phlogiston; expect to see mostly "Other" for now. Max to schedule follow-up in 2 weeks.
 * 1) Mark all quarterly goals (highest "parent" Phab ticket) as Milestone
 * 2) Josh marked https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94037 during the meeting.
 * 3) May do more later in the quarter; this is the guinea pig.
 * 4) All tasks must remain in at least one of Wikipedia-iOS-App-Product-Backlog or Wikipedia-iOS-...-Development.
 * 5) All child tasks of Milestones must be assigned as descendents (via "Blocks")
 * 6) Make sure source and recategorization are current (finished during meeting)