[Archivesspace_Users_Group] tutorial on ArchivesSpace's use of Pivotal Tracker and development roadmap?

Thu Apr 17 19:28:29 EDT 2014

Dear Christine, Cassie, and Audra,

Let me try to answer your very good and timely questions and comments.

To begin, we have just this month transitioned from contracted development to community supported development.   Work done under contract development was primarily determined by the terms of the contract, the most recent of which is still present on the ArchivesSpace website at http://www.archivesspace.org/developmentplan.  Community supported development is guided by the needs of the community as registered in feature requests and bug reports from the ArchivesSpace membership.

In preparation for that transition, we have populated the User and Technical Advisory councils and created subgroups within each Council that are assigned to certain areas of responsibility or work areas.  In the Technical Advisory Council, the work areas are Architecture, Committer Oversight, Migration, and Technical Documentation.  In the User Advisory Council, the work areas are feature prioritization/testing, user documentation, reporting, and gap analysis between AT/Archon and ArchivesSpace.  Many of these groups have just been formed and are still in the early days of defining their work scope and processes.

Nevertheless, we have started to implement and test a development workflow, the key steps of which are:

1)      A development cycle will be a month long instead of the two week long cycle used with the contractor.

2)      At the beginning of each month, the features prioritization subgroup of UAC will

a.       Test and accept user stories done during the previous cycle

b.      Prioritize work to be done during the current cycle by the ArchivesSpace Developer and others.

3)      The ArchivesSpace developer Chris Fitzpatrick and others will address the prioritized work, notifying the features prioritization near the end of the cycle when work is ready for testing

4)      The features prioritization subgroup will then test work, either accepting it for release or sending it back for additional work.

5)      Releases will be made periodically, but we are not sure yet if that means every month, every quarter, or some other interval.

Because development resources are very limited right now, one developer who also has a certain amount of management responsibilities, the features prioritization subgroup is focusing on "families" of user stories for the short-term, that is, user stories clustered around a certain functional area such as agents/names, which, in fact, is the focus of this "first" cycle of development.  We agreed, in discussion with Chris F. that this approach would more likely expedite development at this point in time than would prioritizing un-related stories.

The ArchivesSpace Pivotal Tracker (https://www.pivotaltracker.com/s/projects/386247) reflects all of the development work identified so far.  Items in the "Icebox" are waiting prioritization by the features prioritization subgroup.  Items in the "Backlog" are pending assignment and scoring by the developers.  Items in "Current" are being worked on (although currently there are a number of items in "Current" that still need to be scored).  And, of course, items in "Done" are all the stories that have been completed, accepted, and released.  Several internal releases may be issued before a public release is distributed.  The internal releases are for facilitating testing of the stories to be included in a public release.  Internal releases iterate due to stories being sent back for additional work or due to new bugs surfacing during the release process.

I, too, think it would be great to have a development schedule and to be able to say that by the end of June all import / export needs will be addressed or that by end of the summer all public UI issues will  be addressed.  But I don't think we know enough about our capacities yet to do that.

I think that is a snapshot of where the ArchivesSpace development process is right now in this transitional period.  We expect to clarify and better document the process as it takes form over the next several months.

All best,

Brad W.

Bradley D. Westbrook
Program Manager
brad.westbrook at lyrasis.org<mailto:brad at archivesspace.org>
800.999.8558 x2910
678.235.2910
bradley_d_westbrook (Skype)
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From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org [mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org] On Behalf Of Christine Di Bella
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2014 12:25 PM
To: 'Archivesspace Users Group'
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] tutorial on ArchivesSpace's use of Pivotal Tracker and development roadmap?

Given that many issues we users note here have been noted previously by project team members, it would be really helpful to hear from Brad and others on the ArchivesSpace team about how members and other ArchivesSpace users can look up and "read" stories in Pivotal Tracker and determine whether an issue is being actively addressed. For example, it looks like the stories on search that Chris Prom submitted are all in the "Icebox" and presumably not being actively worked on. What goes into determining priorities and how are the different categories being used by the ArchivesSpace team?

It would also be great to be able to understand what's intended for near-term and longer term releases. I'm admittedly confused by all the different release candidates listed in Pivotal Tracker for 1.0.9 and could use a primer on that, but I'm also very interested in knowing what's prioritized for the future and how that has been determined.

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I really want ArchivesSpace to succeed and I fully recognize that it's only a small team for whom this is a full-time job. The more you can help us to navigate the information available - and to do our part to make sure it's recorded when something is really important to us - the more we can hopefully help that happen. Thanks in advance!

Best,
Christine
Christine Di Bella
Archivist
Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center
Institute for Advanced Study
Einstein Drive
Princeton, NJ  08540
Email : cdibella at ias.edu<mailto:cdibella at ias.edu>
Phone: 609-734-8368
Website : http://library.ias.edu/archives

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