[Fg-general] Re: grant commit for next month

[Luke Closs]

Hi Stephen,

I've started bringing the grant details to the wiki here:

  http://wiki.freegeekvancouver.org/article/Build_Program_Grant

I'll now start adding some example Story Tests.  I'll explain my thinking
process here.

Lets take the very first step of Phase 1 of the grant:

  Build Coordinator/Instructor training and workshops: Volunteer Coordinator
and Reuse Coordinator, in conjunction with Education workgroup will conduct
workshops how to teach; sensitivity training; how to assess Build
applicants; familiarity with Pre-Build and Build material and conventions;
how tracking Build volunteer hours and information in the database.

There is a lot packed into this one point, so we need to start breaking it
apart and asking what each of the pieces mean and imply.

* Goal: train build coordinators & instructors
* Who's involved: Volunteer coordinator (Megan?), reuse coordinator (?) and
Education Workgroup (mailing list people)
* Questions implicitly raised but not explicitly answered:
** Who will be trained?  1 person?  100 people?
** How many workshops? 1?  100?  1 a week?
** Is this all 1 course, or several courses?

At this stage, we should go talk with our peers to clarify what we really
intended.  There could be several outcomes:

1) There is an answer that was implicit at the time of writing, or to
certain people.
2) The question is not relevant anymore, so we should update the premise or
original statement.
3) We never really thought about it initially, so we take some time to
decide now, and then we update the document.

I'm going to make some unverified guesses for the questions I asked above.
You should seek to verify the assumptions I'm making, and we should seek
review from our peers as we make progress.

With some good understanding of this point, we can now start re-stating all
the implicit parts of this first step into "tests" that should all be true
statements when that step is considered complete by our community.  Please
take my suggestions below just as a first draft, a starting point - we'll
want to refine these.

* [[Workshop: How to teach Build]] course outlines exists and has group
consensus on its contents
* [[Workshop: Sensitivity Training]] course outlines exists and has group
consensus on its contents
* [[Workshop: How to assess build applicants]] course outlines exists and
has group consensus on its contents
* [[Workshop: How to track Build Volunteers]] course outlines exists and has
group consensus on its contents
* A process exists to track which volunteers have gone through which
workshops, and when.
* All 4 workshops have been taught to at least 10 volunteers each, as show
by our records
* 3 different people feel comfortable teaching the above 4 workshops


So we can see that one single point actually involves many people and many
discrete steps.  With this break down, it's now much more obvious what is
the first thing we should do: start creating workshops.  This breakdown also
shows that while Stephen must be on top of this step to keep it making
progress, he actually relies on many other people within FreeGeek to help
make this happen.  For this step, at least, Stephen will need to coordinate
action, work with others to create/update workshops, and then work with
others to run those workshops.

I've figured out mediawiki's cryptic table syntax and added these to the
grant program page.

So the general process is:
* seek to understand the intent of the step
* look for all the explicit and implicit details
* break down the step into substeps
* look for ways to verify the finished-ness of each substep - those become
your tests
* be verbose and explicit, so we collectively understand what is and is not
required/expected

I hope this has been helpful.

Stephen - I'd like for you to try out this process on the remaining Stage 1
steps, and then ping me and I'll give you a review.  If you have questions
about how to compose tests or how to decompose the steps, please ping me in
IRC, i'm usually around.

Cheers,
Luke

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Stephen Samuel <samuel at bcgreen.com> wrote:

> Yes, I'd be more than interested in your idea of working with me on this.
> If you give me a proposal of a couple of times when we could meet to do
> this,
> I'm sure that I can find a way to make one of them work.  Sunday an Mondays
> are
> acceptable options for this, as far as I'm concerned.
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:41 PM, Luke Closs <lukecloss at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> (cc'd to fg-general as a good, open communication practice.)
>>
>> Hey Stephen,
>>
>> I thought I'd share some thoughts about what I'd like to see for the
>> Vancity Grant Report next month.
>>
>> In Agile Development practices, there is the idea of "story tests", or
>> "project tests".  These tests are basically re-stating the more
>> verbose prose of the requirements.  The end result is a list of
>> statements that *should be true* when the project is done.  Usually
>> the process of writing these tests reveals the "implicit" requirements
>> in a project, which has been extremely invaluable in my experience.
>>
>> So some examples would probably be good (i'm just making these up):
>>
>> * Wiki contains up-to-date process information on Build Program FooBar
>> * 5 Build Trainers are actively involved each week
>> * 20 Systems are built each week
>> * 2 Grillion machines were built in the past year
>>
>> This kind of thing.  Basically they are statements that we can
>> evaluate to be true or false.
>>
>> Anyways,  This may be a good way of thinking about and presenting our
>> progress towards the grant.  So your focus becomes to keep working on
>> the failing tests.  It's something you can keep coming back to.
>>
>> I just was doing this today with some work code and automated tests,
>> and it was awesome.  Keep coming back to the tests.  See what is
>> failing, then fix it.  Coding nirvana. :)
>>
>> Perhaps we could collaborate on writing some of these, if you're
>> interested.  We could probably do the bulk of this on the public wiki.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Luke
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Stephen Samuel http://www.bcgreen.com
> 778-861-7641
>