+1 sounds great! I like the idea of making epics more manageable and the ability to file JIRAs based on a design doc while still separating the Epic for the MVP from the further phases.
> On Oct 15, 2015, at 10:11 AM, Bernd Mathiske <be...@mesosphere.io> wrote: > > Proposal: in extension of today’s limited two-level (epic, task) approach, > make full use of expressive power already available in JIRA to provide more > structure for larger projects to facilitate planning, tracking, and > reporting. This will facilitate dynamically planning of sub-projects, which > will make us more agile. > > The general idea is to use links between epics to provide a recursive > hierarchical structure, with which one can span trees or DAGs of arbitrarily > large projects. This does not mean that we want to plan everything in minute > detail before starting to work. On the contrary. > > You can start anywhere in the eventual tree and express part of the overall > effort, maybe say a short epic with a few task tickets. Then you can LATER > make this epic a dependency for a larger effort. > > Conversely, you can subdivide a task in the epic into subtasks. However, this > does not mean that you have to literally use the feature “subtask” in JIRA > for this. Instead, staying recursive in our JIRA grammar, so to speak, > convert the task to an epic and then create ordinary tasks in it to represent > subtasks. > > Now the task cannot be a task in its parent epic anymore. We fix this by > putting in a link of type "blocks" to the parent. When you then look at the > parent, it still holds a number of tasks, and it has one dependency on an > epic (to which you can add more). > > Thus our dependency tree can grow in all directions. You can also rearrange > and update it in any shape or form if necessary. > > Overall, we only use two JIRA elements: epics and tasks (of different flavors > such as bugs, improvements, etc.). Tasks are the leaves, everything else is > an epic. Review requests only ever happen for tasks. > > The epics are there to provide a high level view and to allow dynamic (“more > agilish”, non-waterfall) planning. Granted, you’d also use a tree if you did > waterfall. The difference is that you’d spec it all out at once. My > observation is that not too few of us do exactly this - outside JIRA - and > then try to remember what tickets are where in their tree. Let’s make this > part of JIRA! > > Why not use labels? Because they are in a flat name space and we want to > represent tree structure. How would you know that a label denotes a > subproject of another label? By memorizing or by depicting a tree outside > JIRA. Why not use components? Same problem as with labels: flat name space. > We can use labels and components these for many other purposes. Separate > discussion. > > Aren’t we doing this already? Probably. I have not checked thoroughly. There > may occasionally be epics that link to other epics. If so, I would merely > like to encourage us to use this powerful expressive means more often. > > Bernd >
