At Cauldron we use GitLab labels and boards to make an easier development of the platform, grouping the issues according to its nature, deadline or status, among other things.
Planning
These labels are used for the roadmap, or to check what’s the status of a tasks in a given sprint. They allow us to group tasks in meaningful columns.
From the sprint view, we have these labels:
-
Epic: for tasks to be resolved during a sprint time. In rare occasions
epicscould last more than one sprint depending on their complexity and potential blockers. Eachepicmust be associated to a milestone. - Doing: for tasks currently being resolved.
- Blocked: for tasks waiting for others to be resolved to resolve it.
- Review: for tasks resolved but waiting for someone to review the solution implemented.
From the roadmap view, we have these labels:
- Near Term: for features to be solved during next 3 months.
- Mid Term: for features to be solved in 3 to 6 months.
- Long Term: for features to be solved later than 6 months.
Issue type
Each GitLab issue is tagged depending on its own characteristics. The labels used for this purpose are:
- bug: for glitches found in the platform.
- feature: for platform’s features we plan to develop or requested by the users.
- docs: for documentation related with Cauldron in general.
Working area or topics
These labels are used depending on the area or areas of Cauldron the task is related to. The labels used are the following:
- Topic Infra: for issues or tasks related to platform infrastructure like cloud environments, source code management system, issue tracker, community forum, etc.
-
Topic Backend: for issues or tasks related to Cauldron’s backend. Additionally to it, we have, to be more specific if needed:
- Topic Grimoirelab: for issues or tasks related to grimoirelab that might have a link to an issue in GrimoireLab’s issue tracker system.
- Topic Scheduler: for issues or tasks related to Cauldron’s tasks scheduler.
- Topic OpenDistro: for issues or tasks related to OpenDistro for Elasticsearch
-
Topic UI: for issues or tasks related to Cauldron’s user interface. Additionally to it, we have:
- Topic Visualizations: for issues or tasks related to data and metrics visualizations.
- Topic Kibana: for issues or tasks related to Kibana from OpenDistro for Elasticsearch.
- Topic Community: for issues or tasks related to Cauldron’s community (like blog posts).
- Topic Feedback: for issues opened by external contributors to Cauldron Team.
- Topic Management: for issues related to project management (like for example the discussion about which labels to use).
Once the labels are defined, we use the GitLab boards to see the grouped issues at a glance.
Roadmap
Each month, the Cauldron Team meets to review the roadmap board status, to move features to closer term and, potentially, to propose new “features” for upcoming months. These “features” are tagged as as near-mid-long term depending on when we want to have them solved.
For the first ones, in Near Term tag, the development team splits them into epics for the upcoming sprints. And those epics are tagged according to the working area of Cauldron they are related to.
In the roadmap board we have made a division to see the issues grouped according to their deadline.
Sprint
Every 15 days, the Cauldron team meets to plan the epics that will take place during the sprint, as well as the selection of issues from user feedback that will be carried out.
The current sprint board is denoted with a > symbol at the beginning of the board name, for example, > Rice. In the board we have made a division to see the issues grouped according to their status (doing, blocked, review).
Topics
The issues in Cauldron may belong to one or more topics, that is, areas of working defined by the development team. In this board we have made a division to group the issues according to their topic.
Cauldron.io Team