Core Contributors Sprints

antoviaque · November 30, 2021, 6:41pm

This threads moves a discussion from the core contributors mailing list, about how to better plann and coordinate our work. This is meant to make the discussion public, and allow everyone to contribute to it.

My original post:

To help us all to learn more about our respective efforts as core contributors, and coordinate better among ourselves, we have discussed an idea a few times but never acted upon it: establishing proper sprints for core contributor work. In particular, utilizing the planning elements of scrum – we already have tickets for most of our work, but outside of specific working groups who do some planning and/or updates, we often don’t know much about what other core contributors are working on, or what are blocking or urgent for others that we could help with.

So, what about trying to do some sprint planning together, regularly?

We could then coordinate better on initiatives – for example, a contributor planning to send a PR or OEP on a given project could get another contributor to plan to do the core review, accelerating or unblocking projects.

It could also help to be more conscious of the community priorities – for example, when a stable release approaches, get more core committers to take tickets to match a specific release deadline, beyond those who regularly participate in the release working group.

Do you think it would be a good idea? And if so, how would that ideally work?

Given the spread of timezone, imho ideally this would be done async – though to get things started within the community, experience has shown that it’s often very valuable to have regular face-to-face discussions. So maybe it would make sense to start with a monthly or bi-weekly meeting? It could either be a new dedicated meeting (possibly on rotating timezone?), or since a fair number of us already attend the bi-weekly contributors meetup, we could potentially dedicate a portion of that meeting for it?

It’s still pretty much an embryo of idea at the brainstorming phase, so don’t hesitate to comment and suggest approaches on this – the more useful it would be to each of us, the more likely it would help improving the core contributor program as a whole?

antoviaque · November 30, 2021, 6:49pm

Here are the discussions & replies that have followed so far:

@regis wrote:

@antoviaque wrote:

Thanks for the thoughts Regis!

(Btw, to the other core contributors – could you take a few minutes of your dedicated core contributor time to send your thoughts too? I could send more concrete next steps, but the broader set of contributions at the current brainstorming stage, the more likely the end result will match something we would all want.)

On Fri, Nov 12, 2021, at 05:08, Régis Behmo wrote:

I’m always up for more collaborative work! The way I see it is that such a group would work not just because we are core committers, but mostly because we are Open edX technical experts. Thus I expect that technical conversations would be very productive between us. So yes, it make sense to try to work together – if only to bounce ideas with the group.

+1 to the goal of working more together. I think the more we are aware of each other’s work and goals, the more we’ll be able to find ways to work together.

For being technical experts – that’s true of some of the core contributors, in particular the developers – but we need to keep in mind that we are also integrating some less technical contributors roles. There is indeed a technical aspect everywhere in our contributions though.

In fact, I have wanted for a long time to create a development working group. This working group would be tasked with the development of specific features and fixing bugs that affect the community. I guess it would make sense to create such a working group by starting with the core committers.

It would likely make sense to have some group or process dedicated to developer roles yes (as well as for most of the different types of core contributors). For a developer working group though, how would you handle the overlap with the existing working groups that are oriented towards developers – like the front-end or data working groups? Would that be a “meta” working group, which includes different subgroups?

As for the relation to sprints – imho the concept is broader than developer sprints; it would be useful to plan together our work across all core contributor disciplines. Probably not all in the same meeting – and that’s where individual working groups have an important role to play: ie planning for a release working group sprint might be best done within the context of the release working group meetings. But there is also value in exposing that planning at a higher level, across disciplines.

Maybe we could consider doing a proper scrum of scrum planning – with individual working groups planning each sprint within the context of their own meetings, but with synchronized sprint periodicity, and with the lead/chair of each group (plus whoever wants to join) going over their sprint planning in a scrum of scrum meeting?

This is actually already the role assigned to the biweekly contributors meetup, but it tends to err a bit on the technical side at times (which I think is responsible for making the Stefania and Nicole from the marketing working group stop attending it a few months ago ), and since we don’t have any normalized process to plan sprints, we don’t really review the boards anymore (which we used to do initially at that meetup). Maybe moving the more technical discussions and defining a common process for sprint planning would help?

@Felipe wrote:

Thanks for starting this Xavier.

This topic of how to organize a group as diverse as this is rather difficult for me, so please don’t take my lack of response as a lack of interest. I just find it hard to respond to this type of thread.

I echo Regis’ sentiment of being up for more collaborative work and I like the idea of a developers working where we can present ideas and give/get support in making them land in the correct repository they need to go.

I have sometimes struggled to find something useful to do with my CC time/effort. I think I would benefit from knowing what others are working on and where a review, an approval or merge would unblock them.

You mentioned that for kick starting this effort we might need some initial face-to-face meetings. I also think that is true, especially since it is way easier (at least it is for me) to work async with someone after I have put a face to the name. This might be something that we could hold a few times a year for newcomers. Maybe at the next in real life conference, we can make a birds of a feather for CCs or something similar as well.

@antoviaque wrote:

And I’m also moving a discussion here from a thread on Confluence with Sarina, related to the current topics:

Sarina> As the contributor program is growing (we’re near 30!), we may want to rethink what the “Contributor’s meetup” means (since it’s open to all).

Xavier> It would probably make sense for the things we plan for the core contributors group to remain public and the discussions themselves open to all? The status of core contributor is reserved to specific people, but imho there is a lot to gain in remaining as transparent as possible. The fact that some who aren’t core contributors might join isn’t really an issue I think? On the contrary, it allows them to progressively ramp up their involvement, and move toward becoming core contributors?

Sarina> Perhaps that is the “Developer’s Meetup” and we have a separate explicit “CC working group” that meets every so often.

Xavier> We might end up wanting to split things in different meetings - but it’s quite hard to get people to take the habit of joining a meeting regularly, so I think it would be a smaller step to start by using the contributor’s meetup setting and audience at first, and see if we can get additional core committers to join it? If anything, I would move out the more technical discussions outside of the meeting, and focus on its core goal, which is the update/coordination. It’s been its main goal from the start, to provide an avenue where we would update each other and try to find ways to collaborate.

It’s true though that the number of core contributors would probably make it difficult to have us all at once there – that’s maybe where its role as “scrum of scrums” for community work that Nimisha introduced could be more fully implemented? Some of the sprint planning can happen in smaller workgroup settings (like the release group already does), and just an update is provided by a representative of the group. That would be pretty close to what we do now – the main difference ending up being that we would actually review the tasks boards together, in addition to any work/ticket that doesn’t fall within the scope of any specific working group?

@sarina wrote:

I don’t want to weigh in too much but want to address this:

It would probably make sense for the things we plan for the core contributors group to remain public and the discussions themselves open to all? The status of core contributor is reserved to specific people, but imho there is a lot to gain in remaining as transparent as possible. The fact that some who aren’t core contributors might join isn’t really an issue I think? On the contrary, it allows them to progressively ramp up their involvement, and move toward becoming core contributors?

I wasn’t saying the core contributor’s group be private, simply that, if we’re trying to specifically plan the work that we are all going to do as part of our dedicated time, that could take most of the existing meeting which is already pretty full of its own topics. I get that more meetings suck so maybe from that perspective that would be a bad idea, but from the “focus on one topic” perspective, I think it makes sense to split it up.

@BbrSofiane wrote:

@Maksim_Sokolskiy wrote:

@idegtiarov wrote:

@braden wrote:

antoviaque · November 30, 2021, 7:51pm

Since we agree that it would be good to experiment with sprints for core contributors, and that scheduling a dedicated sprint planning meeting would be a good first step – let’s do that.

Here is a survey to find a time for next week:

https://whenisgood.net/xg5g792

With the approach of the holidays, next week is the last week which will allow us to plan for a decent 2-weeks sprint.

To core contributors: please fill the survey with your availability, by the end of tomorrow Wednesday (Dec 1st) - this way it will give time to collect the results and announce it by the end of the current week, ahead of next week’s meeting.

Note that this work (sprint planning, task allocation for the release) is part of the scope from the declaration of commitment for core contributors, which have been agreed by all our respective organizations – so to be able to prioritize time for this (vs other internal/client projects from our organizations), don’t hesitate to point to that commitment to get the time allocated - that is part of why we made sure all our bosses agreed on this.

Details about the first sprint

For this first iteration, we’ll be focusing on planning technical work related to the upcoming Maple release, which is currently a high priority for the project, and is lacking enough contributions at the moment.

Developer core contributors: have a look at the list of release blockers ahead of the meeting, and grab a ticket? @Zia_Fazal @braden @usman @jill @Felipe @omar @pdpinch @regis @idegtiarov @arbrandes @Maksim_Sokolskiy @BbrSofiane @giovannicimolin @Agrendalath @xitij2000 @jhony_avella @mtyaka
Translation core contributors: would it make sense for you to participate too? Is there any specific planning, work, or testing needed for the upcoming Maple release, regarding translations? Since some of you are also participating to the marketing group, that could also be covered in the context of the upcoming release. @ghassan @abstract-technology @Nicole_Kessler @gabrieldamours @Peter_Koblyakov @juancamilom @cabralpedrofccn @IvoBranco @Carolina_De_Mares (missing forum accounts: Andreas Grähn, Illaria Botti)
Project management core contributors: since it’s currently you @nizar and me - how would you like to participate to this?
UI/UX & product management: @ali_hugo Would you join it too? I don’t know if there is any UX/product work or reviews related specifically to the maple release that are needed (?), but it might still be useful to discuss about your next core contributor tasks there.
@sarina @e0d @nedbat @djoy what about TCRIL & edX/2U staff btw, many of you are helping on the release - I assume they would eventually also become core contributors, but would it make sense for some to join the planning already, in a similar capacity? Maybe the ones who are/will work on the maple release for now?

sarina · December 1, 2021, 9:25pm

@antoviaque I will for sure attend the meeting and have filled out my availability. I’m happy to represent tCRIL, at least for the time being.

On points of who should join - I do believe by and large the Translation CCs are meeting and discussing their efforts as part of the Transifex WG. I’m not sure they need to attend this meeting as well as their efforts are already coordinated. Perhaps it could make sense for a representative to attend, either from the WG or from tCRIL (particularly, @ehuthmacher is involved from the tCRIL side, and there may be another good rep for future meetings who I won’t call out).

@ali_hugo has just joined the program and I’m not sure there’s anything on her plate affecting Maple particularly, but in general her attendance at this meeting would be great as it would help dev CCs be able to get access to a UX-er.

It would be great to have an edX team member join this, whether it’s @nedbat , @djoy , or another nominee.

Thanks for setting this up!

antoviaque · December 2, 2021, 8:29pm

Thanks to everyone who has already answered the poll! I’m pinging the few remaining people who haven’t answered it yet, and we should hopefully be able to figure out a date&time tomorrow. In the meantime, you can see the poll results.

@sarina Yup, it would be good to have at least a representative of each type of core contributor present – this would be important to be able to discover what we do across the different teams, and coordinate projects that need multiple types of contributions.

Though ideally having the whole gang would be nice, at least for this kickoff sprint – this would give us an occasion to meet each other, become aware of what we all do, and see how we want to approach this going forward? Then things could split off to different meetings depending on the type of contribution in the future, but the intent is for sprints to be done and synchronized across all core contributors.

nizar · December 2, 2021, 11:13pm

I love this idea. I understand the need for focusing on one topic and also reducing the number of meetings one would have to attend, mentioned by other members. If refining the Contributor’s Meetup would make that possible, I’d love to participate and contribute.

ali_hugo · December 3, 2021, 7:17am

Hi @antoviaque
I’m keen to join the first sprint planning session. @sarina is right; I’m not working on anything for Maple (in fact, I’m not even sure what it is ), but it will be good to meet everyone and get a feel for where I could contribute.

I’ve selected my available time slots. Thanks for the ping!

antoviaque · December 3, 2021, 7:34pm

Sprint planning meeting time

Thank you for all the answers! I think we have a clear winner for the best slot to do this next week - the first sprint planning meeting will be on Friday December 10th at 2pm UTC.

(There are a few of us for whom the availability won’t match - in which case can you find another core contributor to represent you – like your workgroup chair for example --, and still post the update described below?)

Posting our update (async, by Tuesday)

To make sure we maximize our synchronous time together next week, it’s going to be important to prepare this ahead of time, asynchronously. Could you post the following elements, as a reply below in the current thread?

An update about your core contributor work: what you have worked on in previous months, what you are working on now, and what tasks you would like to take for the upcoming sprint (Dec 10-24)
A list of anything that is blocking you.

To have time to sort out any issues/questions before the meeting, if you could post that update here by the end Tuesday (December 7th), that would help making sure we could figure out issues ahead of time, and have an efficient meeting on Friday.

Picking task(s) for the sprint

For what to pick for the upcoming sprint, we’ll be focusing on the Maple release, so pick tasks related to it as much as possible. But it will still be good to hear about what you’re doing even if it isn’t related.

Make sure there is a ticket created for your somewhere, and assigned to you – here is a list of boards where you can pick or create issues (you can also ask the working group you’re involved in if you’re unsure what to pick, or reply here – also make sure the task is small enough to be finished within the sprint, splitting it as necessary):

Main focus: Maple release issues: release critical issues needing help (all issues)
Community working group board
Core contributors program & other community boards
TCRIL board
Open edX roadmap
Marketing working group board

(Any board missing? if so, comment with a URL, and I’ll add it here)

Comments?

If you have any comments/suggestions about the approach for organizing this sprint, don’t hesitate – I picked a specific way, in order to be able to do a first sprint quickly for Maple, and to have something to comment & iterate over. But that’s not meant to be the final word on how we’ll keep doing this. If you have any comment or changes you’d like to see for the next iteration (or even this one if there is time), don’t hesitate! That’s what this is for, it’s just a MVP.

I’ll prepare an agenda next week, so also don’t hesitate if there is anything you’d like to make sure is on it.

Joining the meeting

I’m also sending a calendar invite now to all core contributors. Community members who aren’t core contributors (yet?) are also welcome to join, meet and pick up tasks with us The meeting will be held at the following URL: Launch Meeting - Zoom . I’ll also post the recording afterwards.

antoviaque · December 3, 2021, 7:38pm

Yup, definitely! We’ll need to do a round of feedback gathering from the first iteration, to incorporate the changes for the next round. We started simple, so this time we have a single meeting for all, but that’s a point of feedback that makes sense to act on for the second sprint. If you would like to help with this, that would be really helpful! Maybe a first step would be to liaise with all the working group chairs/leads, to see how we would integrate this for the different teams? It might make sense to do this after we’ve had the first sprint planning meeting, so that first experience (and its inevitable shortcomings ) are known and fresh in mind?

ghassan · December 3, 2021, 7:50pm

You still seems to be living in Novembar, that is okay I had a simlair mistake today. But you had it two in places here and the mail list humm…

Anyway thanks for the initiative will try to write some update by Dec 7

braden · December 3, 2021, 9:15pm

An update about your core contributor work: what you have worked on in previous months, what you are working on now

I have been working on:

Moving split modulestore’s course indexes from MongoDB to MySQL
Getting devstack to run well on M1 MacBooks WIP PR, Tutor PR
Answering community questions on this forum
Reviewing PRs from the community and the OpenCraft team, e.g. #28219, #29176

what tasks you would like to take for the upcoming sprint (Dec 10-24)

It will be only a half-sprint for me due to the Christmas holiday.

I’ll be working on:

Answer community questions
Finish the work to cutover from MongoDB to MySQL - Cutover to read course index data from MySQL by bradenmacdonald · Pull Request #29184 · openedx/edx-platform · GitHub

A list of anything that is blocking you.

I don’t have any blockers at the moment.

antoviaque · December 4, 2021, 1:53am

@ghassan Good catch! It is indeed on December 10th, not November 10th ;p I’ve edited my post above - thank you.

ghassan · December 7, 2021, 2:01pm

What I have been working on:

Django 3.2 update
Developing a tutor plugin for the forum/discussion/

Stuff I am currently working on:

Documentation i18n
I have this PR which generate transfiex config file for some doc projects. We will push the resources to transifex today (me and @Eden_Huthmacher). So that translators then would be able to translate the docs.
Fix an issue about sending bulk emails raised here and I have a PR here to propose a fix.
TL;DR: about the issue, it’s just about adding a new exception that might be raised by google/SMTP.
It would be great if someone can take a look at it, also I would be glad if someone can guide me through the testing here. I think I need to get my head around those tests.
Maple testing:
Have been testing Maple, in order to upgrade tutor-forum plugin
Frontend-working group:
Have been attending a few meetings. Trying to get my head around the working mechanism and sometimes documents stuff I find interesting or valuable.

giovannicimolin · December 7, 2021, 6:13pm

I recently became a core contributor, and it took me a while to ramp up contributions.

An update about your core contributor work: what you have worked on in previous months, what you are working on now

I have been working on:

Django Upgrades:
- Update or replace django-threadlocals · Issue #36 · edx/upgrades · GitHub
- Update or replace drf-dynamic-fields · Issue #49 · edx/upgrades · GitHub
Reviewing and testing requirement upgrades on xblock-lti-consumer
Replying questions in the edX forums

what tasks you would like to take for the upcoming sprint (Dec 10-24)

It will also be only a half-sprint for me due to the end of year holidays.
I’ll start working on:

Update or replace dry-rest-permissions · Issue #58 · edx/upgrades · GitHub

If I end up with free time, I’ll help with:

Maple release testing/fixes
Answer community questions on Discuss/Slack

A list of anything that is blocking you.

No blockers for CC work.

antoviaque · December 8, 2021, 12:32am

@braden @ghassan @giovannicimolin Thank you!

For my update:

The things I contributed to recently:

Helping to build and organize the core contributors program: things like this sprint planning, the declaration of commitment, etc.
Writing a course about upstreaming, organizing and involving other open source communities in it (to reach out for contributors outside of Open edX)
Moderating the Open edX official forums
Participating to the contributors meetup

community-wg#43 - Organizing and debriefing the first core contributors sprint & planning meetings
- Including ensuring OpenCraft contributes a fair share of the work for the Maple release
community-wg#49 - Organizing the upstreaming onboarding course remote work session
- Including finishing to draft the content for the modules of the upstreaming onboarding course that I’m responsible for
community-wg#50 - Moderating the Open edX forum
Participating to the contributors meetup

Blocker: A lot of the updates for the core contributors are currently missing - so I’m going to chase for those. CC @Zia_Fazal @jill @Felipe @omar @pdpinch @regis @idegtiarov @arbrandes @Maksim_Sokolskiy @BbrSofiane @Agrendalath @xitij2000 @jhony_avella @mtyaka @abstract-technology @Nicole_Kessler @gabrieldamours @Peter_Koblyakov @juancamilom @cabralpedrofccn @IvoBranco @Carolina_De_Mares @Andreas_Grahn @Ilaria_Botti @nizar @ali_hugo

@sarina @e0d @nedbat @djoy I know you’re currently not core contributors, but would you like to post an update too? It could be useful to know what you’re up to

nizar · December 8, 2021, 12:58am

Forum moderation
Answering community questions on the forum and/or slack
Hosting and recapping the contributor’s meetup

At the moment, I’m dealing with some mental capacity issues, personally. So I would not like to pick-up anything additional.

For now, I’d like to continue with my recurring work mentioned earlier, forum moderation, hosting and recapping the contributor’s meetup, and helping out on slack and/or forum.

It’s not a blocker mainly, but the contributor’s meetup is during the Open edX Virtual Event on December 14. Finding a different time for it would be disruptive to most contributors.

So I’m wondering if the next meetup should instead be Tuesday December 28, or since most members might not be available during that time of the year, Tuesday January 11.

I need more input on this as this decision isn’t only mine to make.

antoviaque · December 8, 2021, 1:46am

Oh, good point, thank for noticing this @nizar. It might be worth checking for conflicts like that next time we organize a virtual event, the contributor meetup is indeed quite difficult to reschedule.

Imho, moving it to December 28th would probably not be worth it, I agree with you that most people will be on vacation. Cancelling two in a row would be too bad though, as then we wouldn’t have it for more than a month. Maybe we could move it by one week, and have the next meeting on December 21st? Then keep it every two weeks from that, which would avoid the week between Christmas and New Year?

jill · December 8, 2021, 1:57am

2021 Past work:

Reviewed and/or merged 18 edx/configuration OSPRS.
Replied to >50 discussion posts.
Provided some content for the Open edX Developer Onboarding course.
Progressed the Open edX Leaderboard project a little (work is paused, anyone is welcome to grab this!)

Current work:

Providing reviews and project management support for the Open source contributors course (MOOC-FLOSS)
Developer for the Content Core Platform Simplification [BD-13] blended project

Planned work:

Wrapping up PRs for BD-13 and helping with hand over to new project owner.
Continue work on MOOC-FLOSS.
Continue replying to forum posts.
Review/contribute to BTR#121

Many of the BTS issues blocking Lilac/Maple are ecommerce issues, but there are no core committers on the ecommerce repo. Could one or two be added there?

nizar · December 8, 2021, 2:01am

Yeah! That’s a great point.

That sounds like an amazing suggestion! Before I move forward with this, I’ll need to check if there are any other meetups happening that would conflict with it. If there are none, I’ll update that event.

Moving it to December 21st would require having a contributor’s meetup on Tuesday January 4, which isn’t an ideal date.

So, I’m in favor of keeping the meetup after on Tuesday January 11, and then every two weeks from that. It would ensure more people are back from their vacations.

This would only “disrupt” the next meeting, and not the recurring events after.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Also,

That sounds good I’d love to help with that!

Zia_Fazal · December 8, 2021, 6:45am

I have been working on

adding video_complete event in event-routing-backneds
Ability to add plugin context and plugin templates in LMS instructor dashboard

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