Team Practices Group/Measuring Types of Work

Category A
"Keeping the lights On"

Something essential will fail immediately (days? hours?) if this work is not done.

Category B
"Maintenance"

anything which keep search ticking, but doesn't related directly to our goals

Something essential will fail or degrade fairly soon (weeks? months?), or will cost much more to fix later, if this work is not done now.

Category C
"New Projects"

Functionality that is not currently available.

Can a team be their own customer? If a team delivers functionality to themselves, to make their own work easier/cheaper/better, is that category C, or B?

So this includes *all* new features, even if they are relatively minor tweaks to existing functional areas?

Uncategorized
Prototyping/Research

Tech Debt

responsive correction

meta-work

Category A
Supporting others

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Upstream_projects and who (if anyone) is tasked with fixing bugs in extensions/code that no existing team/individual is currently (officially) working on.

Category B
Internal to team goals

Interrupt vs planned
For a Scrum team, would this just be "This work was added after we had locked in our tasks for this sprint", or would it also include "We have known about this for months but is is not part of our main thrust"?

Category A
most strategic in terms of achieving our mission

Category B
Not Strategic. Shouldn't be doing it.

Prototyping / research
= What teams can measure today =

VisualEditor
All tasks in one big Phab project. "Tranche 0" projectcolumn contains all of Category A, most of Category B, but makes no distinction between A and B. Category C is accurately tracked (as the sum of everything else).

Discovery
Discovery has not yet had internal needs to distinguish these categories, so it would be difficult to measure any of them without tweaking our processes. We are open to tracking what needs to be tracked, although obviously would prefer to avoid heavy burdens in doing so.