Several of us from Red Hat (Daniel, Kaleb, Matt, and I) recently took some agile training. We would like to use some of that in improving how we manage development priorities and response to issues. Our training presented two methodologies, Scrum and Kanban. We generally preferred Kanban and would like to open a community discussion. We will take some time on the community call tomorrow.

In the meantime, I started exploring how we could use github to help manage, and realized the “projects” that Supriti introduced us to a couple years ago are Kanban boards… Playing around, it’s real easy to manage the backlog and moving cards through to completion, and additionally, issues can be turned into cards, or issues created from cards.

The way I see this working:

Cards can be used to manage the backlog and show progress on items (if an issue is also a card, the column it’s in shows in the issue making it easy to cross reference).

Issues are easy for outsiders to raise issues, they also provide a comment stream for discussion (non-issue cards can be edited, but that’s not a good way to keep a conversation). Issues also provide labels which we can use to indicate priority or follow a github suggestion of labelling “good for beginners” issues. Issues can also be assigned to individuals (though I think you need to be added to the nfs-ganesha project to be assigned issues).

I’d love it if there was integration with gerrithub, but I haven’t found any yet, but we can certainly cross link between issues and gerrithib patches. Given gerrithub’s management of multiple versions of patches and making the entire comment history easily available, I prefer to use gerrithub for patch submission even though github pull requests CAN be integrated with the Kanban project.

I’ve created a Ganesha 4 project, though I’m not sure we want to necessarily have a project per release, maybe just a single project. Also, I’m not sure if we can link the project to the ntirpc repo also, or if we need to have a separate project for it (or just use soft links, but since ntirpc DOES use github pull requests, it would be nice to have that integration into the Kanban project.

Please take some time to play around before tomorrow’s meeting. Feel free to create a card for something you’re working on, and possibly turning it into an issue, and play around with linking an issue you’re commenting on to the project. Let us know what you think of this idea.

Thanks

Frank