Integration Plan (part 1)

Recently I blogged about using Bugzilla to track features. I am happy to report that things are moving forward really well thanks to the community and Mylyn. We now have created the high-level delivery plan for Symbian^3 in Bugzilla, and completed the details for one of the key features: New Graphics Architecture (NGA – aka Screenplay).

As you can see from the picture, Mylyn makes it really simple for anyone to keep an eye on the plan.

BUG_ID 176 is the top level entry for NGA. In this post, I won’t go into the specific details of NGA, but explain the next step that we are taking in our planning: The Integration Plan.

Having all this data in Bugzilla allows us to build a good view of  the progress of a specific release. As we do not want to be monitoring every single submission, we have decided to follow the implementation of  “Key Features” (we are currently discussing the key features for Symbian^3)

The aim is to extract all the good information provided by the package owners and put into a format that facilitates the analysis of the health of the release. Taking a leaf from the Agile book, and introducing a 2-week regular heartbeat for our kits releases and tracking feature increments against it (for regular kit updates click here).

Also, any data beyond 6 months from “today” is displayed in quarters since we need to remain flexible and responsive to change (a “scaling agile” practice). Hence, it is understood that the detailed plan beyond 3 months will be fluid and beyond 6 months is only an indication of intent.

It is  probably worth noting at this point that the integration plan is based on voluntary contributions, and that we aim to increase the confidence in it by promoting frequent stage deliveries and asking the contributors to provide regular updates when changes occur.

The above table is a section of the full integration plan for Symbian^3

We will provide additional value to the Bugzilla data by providing a statement of the “Risk-level” of the contribution.

This reflects the release manager’s personal judgement, taking into consideration other aspects of the submission such as dependencies with other backlog items, IP licensing  issues, engagement of the contributors with package owners or the foundation team… and so on. This is signified by a B.R.A.G. status.

So were is the integration plan? Well … it’s still under development, it has been internally reviewed and it will be published by the end of September via the Release Planning site. If you want to make sure you get it hot off the press, you can either follow me on twitter or subscribe to the wiki site.

This blog entry is an early preview of what we are planning to do, and I would like to solicit your feedback on the soundness of the high-level concepts ellaborated here. Please share your views with us!