Planning a Program Increment
The overall scope of the work that management thinks should be done for a quarter (i.e., a PI) is given in the Candidate Feature list. The Planning Agenda describes how the 200+ people in the ESDIS project will coordinate the planning process for that work.
Information sources:
- Overall information with schedule: https://wiki.earthdata.nasa.gov/display/EPS/ESDIS+Program+SAFe
- Planning Agenda: https://wiki.earthdata.nasa.gov/display/EPS/PI+Planning+for+23.4+Agenda
- Candidate features: https://wiki.earthdata.nasa.gov/display/EPS/PI+23.4+Candidate+Features#tab-Transformation
But... The Candidate Feature list is not the only place where features are found. Other places include:
- Features that were not completed in the previous quarter (Carryover);
- Features that are internal to the group (Team); and
- Features that are important to other groups in the larger collection of groups (aka, 'train', Train-level)
Regardless of source, all features are planned similarly.
How to plan a feature
Based on the introduction, there are four kinds of features: Candidate, Carryover, Team and Train. All these are planned the same way except for the start of the process. The Candidate features have a more formal origin than the remaining three feature types.
- In Jira, write an Epic for the feature.
- Include the Acceptance Criteria (AC) for the feature in the Epic's AC - you may have to hunt around Jira's various 'Edit' features to find how to add/edit an AC
- Bind this to the PI using a Fix Version label for the PI (e.g., Transformation PI 23.4)
- For that feature, write one or more tickets that describe what to do
- For each ticket, assign a person
- assign points
- write an AC
- make it visible as part of the P by assigning a Fix Version label for the given PI (e.g., Transformation PI 23.4)
- map those tickets across the Sprints in the PI
- If there is a dependency between our work on the feature and some other team, link that using a ticket in the Epic, not the Epic itself.
If another team has feature that will depend on us in some way, make a non-Epic (e.g., Task) ticket and link that up with the non-Epic ticket in their Jira.
Why do all this labeling and linking? Because that's how the page of Objectives and Risks (e.g., https://wiki.earthdata.nasa.gov/display/EPS/Transformation+Train+-+PI+23.4+-+Objectives%2C+Risks%2C+and+Dependencies+Dashboard#tab-OPeNDAP) gets the stuff it displays.
