Project Management
This is a repository for general 3um Group project management.
tl:dr: We have a daily, all-hands call that is usually at 10am EST. The time, date and other info for each week's call is announced in an issue in this repository. Propose agenda items for the call by commenting on the issue!
We use a loose agile approach, breaking our work into weekly sprints. Here are some things that are good to know:
- Every Monday we have our team sync calls. The most important call is the all-hands call; we try to keep this short, it has an agenda, and anyone (including you) can propose an agenda item for it.
- We create a "sprint issue" for each sprint. That is where we put all the information about the week's calls. That's also where the notes from that week's calls accumulate.
- There are some project-specific sprint discussions after the all-hands call. You're welcome to go to those, too. For more info about these calls, read the sprint discussions section below.
- You do not have to follow all of the project-specific discusions. They can be very detailed. Only go to ones you want to go to. We post the notes (such as they are) in the sprint issue in this repository afterwards.
- If you have a topic to discuss or have done work that you want to tell everyone about, propose the agenda item my adding a comment on that week's sprint issue.
You can also find a list of Distributed Teams resources on tools, decision making, process, etc, that we have been gathering, reviewing, discussing and experimenting with at distributed-teams folder.
As the Da Planet Security team is all over the world, we've picked a set of "working hours" during which we can overlap. The hours are:
16:00-19:00 Z/UTC daily or
18:00-21:00 CEST daily or
12:00-15:00 EST daily or
09:00-12:00 PDT daily
We aim to be available during these hours. Your mileage may vary.
When: Every Monday.
How: This takes place synchronously using Google Meet.
Our sprints cover many different subject areas, that interest distinct but overlapping groups of people. Everyone is welcome to participate on all of them -- hence they do not overlap in time -- though they are geared towards the main people handling those areas.
The sprint discussions give a high throughput (video call) environment to talk about status, next goals, problems, solution approcahes, and so on. They're mostly free form, but should endeavor to identify a set of tasks to do, even if those tasks won't all get done this sprint.
To help moderate our meetings and keep things to the point. We use Alignment.io and Jira.
If you are interested in participating, please join us on Google Meet.
We start every Monday Sprint with an All Hands call. This is a regular, reliable, short call Where everyone who's working on any repository under 3um Group umbrella checks in and has a chance to either call attention to particular items, to make announcements, or to seek discussion of a topic. It's also a way for casual followers to get a high-level update on the pulse of projects without having to follow all of the sprint calls. Newcomers are very welcome.
We end every sprint on Friday with an Sprint retrospective. Doing this meeting; we do a quick anonymous health check of our teams and projects.
After the All Hands call, we break down into project-specific calls. These calls are not a time for lengthy announcements or in-depth discussions, but rather a place where we highlight issues that need discussion and where we go over milestones and our progress. We use them to discuss the tickets people are working on and to allow brief discussion of any relevant topics or blockers. If any topics require further discussion, we generally redirect it to either a follow-up call (ie. "Let's discuss this between the three of us immediately after the scrum."), Slack channel, or to GitHub/Jira issues.
The schedule for the sprint discussions for each week is on the corresponding ticket (aka "sprint issue") for that week's sprint.
We use Google Meet for our community calls. This allows us to stream directly to YouTube, and to have calls with up to 100 users. Google Meet also does not require any additional software outside of one's browser and a gmail account. If you click on a Google Meet link to a meeting room, it will automatically connect. Please let us know if you have any issues with Google Meet.
For all regular calls, we strive to always have the same times, unless there is a very good reason. The times are locked the Friday before the Monday sprint, to ensure that people know when the time will be. We will try not to change times on the day of the actual calls. In general, the rule is that the only adjustment that is okay to do on Monday is adding calls, but not moving around already announced ones.
All of our times are set according to the UTC timezone (or should be). This is much easier than adjusting times manually to accomodate different time zones, for a distributed team. If our calendar's location is set to New York, NY, USA, it is because we're based in New York but should always be on UTC time. It is recommended that you know your timezone's difference from UTC for ease of scheduling. Sites like http://everytimezone.com can help with this..
When posible we rotate who facilitates and takes notes. Here is that list:
- @denzuko
If someone is the notetaker one week, the next week they are the moderator. The list goes down and then around the top. If anyone is unable to go to their meeting, the next person is chosen.
We use Google Keep for taking notes. Our default setting for notes is 'Shareable' - one may need to sign in with your Gmail account in order to edit a document. This ensures that we know who is setting in, without the significant overhead of making a different account somewhere else.
Feel free to join in. All welcome. Open an issue!
This repository and all of our sprint calls fall under the Code of Conduct. We strongly encurage one to read our Contributing Guide