Planning

[balhar-jakub]

Current Situation

• We run a quarterly PI Planning event to sync across the Community and update each other on what's happening.
  • The event consists of Pre-PI Planning readouts around a month before the meeting, where we sync a bit on high-level goals every squad tries to achieve.
  • The week of the PI Planning has TSC and ZAC updates as part of the Wednesday call, followed by readouts. Altogether around three hours
• We also sync weekly on TSC calls, where a rep from every squad is present
• We are running a weekly advisory call named ZAC to help us understand whether our direction is correct.
• For every active release e.g. every 6 weeks we hold System demo showing what was introduced in meantime. This event is more focused on external audience, but we are unable to engage them.

Problems to solve

• Ensure we don't step on each other's toes
• Share with the rest of Zowe and other stakeholders what we plan to deliver for next release
• Share what we delivered in the current release
• Update on what is going around Zowe that impacts Zowe e.g. ZAC Update
• Update on the state of the Zowe community e.g. TSC Update

[balhar-jakub]

Proposal from Jakub Balhar:

• Remove PI Planning and Pre-PI Planning
• Hold System demos on a quarterly basis - This may impact release frequency
• System demos will contain ZAC and TSC Updates and will be propagated to the public audience.
• The day after the system demo will be another call focused on Zowe internally to share the plans for the next release for different squads and see where we have dependencies.
• The TSC, ZAC and Security calls remain unchanged. The Architecture call will be dropped altogether as architecture is also responsibility of the TSC, but the time can be used for other ad-hoc purposes e.g. System demos taking place instead of ZAC + Architecture.

[KUGDev]

@balhar-jakub would it be appropriate to hold System Demos right before the PI final readouts instead of pre- and PI plannings? Probably, this item is telling the same: The day after the system demo will be another call focused on Zowe internally to share the plans for the next release for different squads and see where we have dependencies.

[balhar-jakub]

The proposal is to remove the PI related meetings altogether and instead having just the ZAC and TSC updates + System demos and later basically equivalent of the final readouts.

We can make it altogether, it's only going to be a long meeting.

• 45 minutes TSC + ZAC 5 minutes Pause
• 55 minutes System demo 5 minutes Pause
• 55 minutes Presenting the work for next release.

And the three hours are there if we are rather quick.

[balhar-jakub]

How do I propose to plan and reflect the changes to the plan:

Meetings

System demo

• Longer meeting
• 10 minutes TSC Update
• 10 minutes ZAC Update
• Presentation on what was delivered from squads - 60 minutes
• Presentation on what is planned for the next release (5 mins each squad) - 40 minutes

Overall, the meeting will be between 2 and 2:30 hours.

TSC call

• Update the change to the plans instead of the general status.
• Update on the things ready for delivery

Where do we keep the status?

• Within GitHub
  • The issues that are planned for the next release have Milestone assigned
  • Issues that are looking more forward (year) will be visualized in the Roadmap view and the Roadmap view will be linked from Zowe Docs and README.md
  • Issues that are in neither view are treated as unplanned and as don't expect to deliver them within the next year, the squad validates the most upvoted issues and adapt the plan while preparing for next release.

[balhar-jakub]

The issue is closed for now, we agreed on the plan proposed above.