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.
  • Epics are higher-level features or capabilities that are to be delivered in a cycle. Epic names should be short and descriptive.
  • 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 uninterrupted day of an appropriate developer.

Teams

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

Team Name Responsible Manager
System Management Wil O’Mullane
DM Science Leanne Guy
Architecture K-T Lim
Alert Production John Swinbank
Data Release Production Yusra AlSayyad & 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
Telescope and Site Andy Clements
External None (see below)

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

In general, every ticket should be assigned to a particular team — otherwise, nobody is responsible for ensuring it gets done. If you aren’t sure which team to assign a ticket to, just leave the field blank, and one of the T/CAMs will pick it up. In the exceptional case that the ticket describes work which could be done by either of the Science Pipelines teams (Alert Production and Data Release Production), but it’s not clear which, it can be marked with the label SciencePipelines instead of setting the team.

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).
SciencePipelines Work which should be performed by either AP (02C.03) or DRP (02C.04), but it’s not (yet) clear which so we can’t easily set the “team” field

In addition, please label any tickets describing work performed on documents with an assigned document handle with that handle (DMTN-123, LDM-456, LSE-789, etc).

Components

You can assign one or more components to tickets to describe which part or parts of the system they affect. Components are selected from a pre-defined list; only JIRA administrators have the ability to add new components. The following guidelines may be helpful when choosing components:

  • If the ticket involves working in one or more software repositories, add the corresponding components (for example, afw, daf_butler, ap_association). If no component exists for the repository you are working in, ask your T/CAM for help.
  • If the ticket involves work on a document, choose a component that best describes the type of the document you are working on (for example, Design Documents, Review Documents, Requirements Documents). Even if the document is hosted in a Git repository, don’t add that repository as a component; use a label label instead.