JIRA Agile Usage

Refer to DMTN-020 for detailed information on the JIRA-based planning process used by DM.

Key Concepts

  • Cycles (aka Releases) occur every 6 months.
  • Sprints are monthly, fixed timeframes.
  • Epics are higher-level features or capabilities that are to be delivered in a cycle. Epic names should be of the form “Area Short Description” (e.g. Database qserv refactor)
  • Stories describe concrete, demonstrable features to be delivered in a single sprint.
  • Story points are to be assigned at 2 story points per full-time day of an appropriate developer.
  • Stories and story points should not be changed once work on a story has started.

Teams

The JIRA “team” field is used to define financial and managerial responsibility for getting the work done. We recognise the following teams:

Team Name Responsible Manager
System Management Wil O’Mullane
DM Science Mario Juric
Architecture K-T Lim
Alert Production John Swinbank
Data Release Production John Swinbank
Science User Interface Xiuqin Wu
Data Access and Database Fritz Mueller
Data Facility Margaret Gelman
International Comms and Base Site Jeff Kantor
SQuaRE Frossie Economou
External None (see below)

The “External” team is used to label work done by individuals who are not funded by LSST.

Labels

We support and encourage the use of labels to group related tickets. Their use is not formally restricted or regulated. However, there are a few labels which are of general interest:

Label Meaning
dm-sst This work is of interest to the DM System Science Team.
dm-set This work is of interest to the DM Systems Engineering Team.
dmlt This work is of interest to the DM Leadership Team.
gen3-middleware Work on the “generation 3” Butler and associated middleware (e.g. SuperTask).