Meeting Notes/2016-02-24 Android Phlogiston

Joel to create histogram of completed, pointed Android stories (T124246)
Reviewed current histogram. Is it telling us anything

Dmitry: what would this tell a product owner?

Max: Could use it to assign average value to unpointed tasks, so that we can use them for point-based forecasting, and then figure out how long it would take to burn down the backlog.

Dmitry: in our meetings, it feels ilke 5 is discouraged, better to break things down into smaller points.

Max: We could just use count forecasting, since everything is roughly the same size. Would therefore recommend we don't assign a default point value, and instead rely on count for metrics.

Joel: no big points in histogram, suggesting you do small breakdown only. When you do eg a 2 month project, that ends up being 80 tasks, do you have the list of 80 at the start, or do you discover them week by week?

Dmitry: discover week by week, though we do have epics.

Joel: Judging from the histogram, the epics must be 0-point. If you want more accurate forecasts, probably need to make high-point epics.

Dmitry: not useful to forecast the entire backlog; it has hundreds of items.
Dmitry: We do use t-shirt sizing. It would be helpful to have historical data about how many points/stories ultimately comprised old epics.

Will have the data at the end of this quarter. How do we get it for old data?

Max: would have to do retroactive parenting - assign tasks retrospectively to epics.

Joel: Suggestion: Do a planning session for upcoming features, in which you break out all of the epics and give them all a single value like 20 or 40 (i.e., don't bother to measure big vs small epics, count them all the same). Then, spend Q4 practicing shaving and exploding. This will provide a pilot of doing point-based forecasting, and also will generate useful historical data (about # of tasks per epic) during Q4.

Joel to report on # of tasks done per dev per week
don't have this in data but can estimate.

Dmitry to close Done stories and continue doing so, rather than wait for end of Sprint.
Have been doing that.

Dmitry to assign existing tasks to Sync Saved Pages and Analytics... milestones via "Blocks" relationships
Done. More tasks coming in, getting assigned.

In Phlogiston, they only have 2-5 tasks. can see a few more in Phabricator, up to 10. Not sure if this indicates a problem with Phlogiston data or not.

Dmitry to do work breakdown for Gather Collections
no discussion.

Next Step

 * 1) Max/Dmitry Plan a work breakdown session for Q4.
 * 2) Max: Do historical checking for Q3 t-shirt sizing to see how many points were assigned.
 * 3) Joel/Max to check if Phlogiston category counts are accurate.