Introducing new development outreach channels
Firstly, we want to apologise for the silence since 20 May: this is due to unforeseen medical issues of the Adaptyst main R&D person at CERN.
As a follow-up of the 26 April and 10 May announcements, we want to introduce/explain in more detail the new development organisation and outreach channels: the scrum-based flow and the forum.
Scrum-based flow
Both research and development work on Adaptyst, Adaptyst Analyser, and Adaptyst-team-made modules will be organised in scrum-based sprints consisting of issues specified in our issue tracker.
Unless indicated otherwise, each sprint lasts 2 weeks, starting on a Thursday during the day and ending on a Wednesday at noon. The community around Adaptyst can check out the current status of a sprint by going to the issue tracker (this requires signing up: everybody can do this regardless of whether they have links to CERN) or visiting a forum thread corresponding to the sprint (no sign-up required).
Each issue can have one of these states:
- Backlog: not scheduled in a currently-ongoing sprint.
- To do: scheduled in a currently-ongoing sprint, but no work has begun yet.
- In progress: the work is being carried out at the moment.
- On hold: the work is being carried out in general, but it is not scheduled in a currently-ongoing sprint.
- Waiting for third party: waiting for an input from another person/group at CERN.
- Waiting for external: waiting for an input from a non-CERN person (e.g. a collaborator or an external contributor like you). We need to stress here that voluntary contributors never have any commitments towards us and are perfectly allowed to leave at any time: this is absolutely fine for us, but we’ll appreciate letting us know in this case so that we can update our planning.
- Done: completed.
The community may be updated on specific topics at any time during a sprint rather than only after the end of it. Depending on the nature of a topic, this can happen via public (e.g. the forum) or private (e.g. CERN Mattermost or e-mail) channels or both. It is important to note that some issues may not be visible to everybody due to either being too internal-specific (e.g. in case of some tasks for or requested by CERN experiments) or confidentiality concerns (e.g. in case of security vulnerabilities). Please be reassured though that if any of such issues results in changes to Adaptyst, the changes will be public and explained. Adaptyst will also stay open-source! (especially once we get outside contributions as we don’t have any CLAs in place and this is on purpose)
After the end of each sprint, a blog article will be posted describing the work accomplished, which may also include e.g. challenges faced, reflections on the logistics, next steps etc. (this is somehow similar to a sprint retrospective). Possible deliverables are pull request(s) in the Adaptyst repository(-ies) and research/development contributions discussed in the article. Some activities such as code reviews and release planning are out of scope of the scrum-based flow and take place in parallel to it.
Two sprints have already happened: the first one was a test run and the second one was a more proper sprint. The article discussing the second sprint will be published soon. At the time of writing this post, the third sprint is ongoing.
Adaptyst forum
So far, we haven’t had a place for everyone (including us of course) to freely talk about anything Adaptyst-related beyond feature requests and bug reports. This is changing now with the Adaptyst forum: you can access it at adaptyst-forum.web.cern.ch and sign up there using the same authentication method as you do for the issue tracker. Reminder: you don’t have to have any links to CERN to register!
You’re welcome to ask questions, leave comments, and follow our sprints there. This includes commenting all blog posts published since now as they are cross-posted to the forum.
We hope that the things introduced in this article will make the Adaptyst development more transparent as originally announced on 26 April 🙂