We would like to track "Maintenance Fraction", or portion of team work that is dedicated to maintenance of existing functionality vs creation of new functionality. While there are many half-answered theoretical questions around this, teams participating in the pilot would like to start tagging their stories ASAP, and continue discussing open questions while experimenting with tagging. Participating teams have agreed on the following:
- Of the three suggested categories ("keep the lights on", "preventative maintenance", "new functionality"), teams will not attempt to differentiate between the first two in the initial pilot, so we need to track three categories
- Teams will track their work by tagging tasks with a project tag, unless they already have a way to track this.
- To reduce effort, teams may track only one of the two categories and assume all untagged tasks are in the other category. Since some team backlogs may be biased to one category or the other, teams may want to use either tag this way, so we still need two tags.
The proposed mechanism to agree on tag names is informal discussion through the comment thread of this task. Proposed tag names to start discussion:
#CoreMaintenance
#NewProject
Broader description of project: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Measuring_Types_of_Work, including links to previous discussions and directives.