launchpadblog

Over several months, we have released many small improvements to the project series, milestone, and releases pages to make release planning easier in Launchpad. Well, not all the changes were small. Some were subtly disruptive. Here is an explanation if what happened that I hope will give you ideas of how we can make more improvements.

In November of 2008, Barry Warsaw and myself sprinted with Martin Albisetti to plan the Registry features for Launchpad 3.0. Martin was very insistent that we make series management easier for developers. He proposed a timeline to visualise the past and future of lines of development. You can see the first draft of this feature on the project page now. We are adding it to the series page and the series timeline page (which has always claimed to be a timeline even though it did not present one) for the next release.

I realised during the discussion of how to make the timeline that I did not like the series page, or the milestone and release pages. They looked like historical documents, they were not tools that helped me plan releases.

The immediate problem was that milestones were disconnect from releases, the former must lead to the latter. Even if your project does not use milestones for planning, the information of the milestone is implicit in the release. The release is a device for holding the release notes and the release files, all the other information is the milestone. We made the milestone the primary artefact of the series…milestones may existing long before a release, and not every milestone leads to a release. Creating a release is really an event at the conclusion of the active life of a milestone. We still permit projects to create a release directly from the series page, but you must select the milestone that is being released. If the milestone does not exist, you can create it at that moment. There is no additional work in this process; the milestone fields are the same fields that the release duplicated.

By creating a single page to present the milestone and its release, it became easy to see the planned and achieved work. The page initially shows all the bugs and blueprints targeted for the milestone and you can see the state of each one. When the release is created, the milestone is deactivated (bugs and blueprints cannot be targeted to it any more) and the release note and files are displayed.

The series page now shows the milestone and releases for the series. You can see a summary of all the work targeted to the milestone. You can see which milestones have releases. Developers can see the location of bazaar branch where they can make contributions. Distro packages are listed for distro maintainers and curious users. Adding a milestone to a series is very easy, adding many is easy too.

These pages make my job easier. They are now tools. They could be better though. Martin pressed me into adding the counts of bugs and blueprints in each status for each milestone to the series page. I can see now that they are very useful. I want to add this same summary information to the milestone page. I want to see a burndown chart on the milestone page. A burndown chart is a tool that compares the remaining work in a milestone to an ideal line to meet the milestone estimated release date. I want to know when progress is slow so that I can take action to meet my series’ schedule.

I decided to use the title of “release manager” for the driver assigned to a series. This is a UI improvement. I am a release manager, but I cannot create milestones or releases. Nor can I update these if I want to make a correction. I cannot effectively plan, nor can I create the objective of most of my plans. This sucks. I want to give the release manager the power to accomplish his objectives.

Please give this tools a try. Your feedback is appreciated, as too are your ideas for new features that make release planning easier.