 Alright, so this is a core conversation, planning and executing a focus sprint that actually addresses a blocking area and helps move an open source project forward. I win the award for the longest title. You can follow along with this presentation. It's revealed in a GitHub repo and a link to it is bit.ly slash sprint dash planning. I'm Kathy Thays, I'm the SCT in Drupal and also on Twitter. I work at Blackmesh and I get paid to work on core, go to events, onboard new contributors at sprints and they pay me to do that because they have like 65% of their hosting business is with Drupal sites. So that's their way of giving back and strengthening the Drupal project. Peter Willanon, Pete Willanon on Drupal.org in IRC. I work for Acquia mostly doing hosting engineering currently. I do not get paid to actually contribute to Drupal though Acquia sends me to some events like this and some sprints and I take vacation time thanks to our unlimited vacation policy. So I take advantage of that to find time to contribute. So in general this talk is going to be about Drupal 8 though hopefully you will find the things we talk about are relevant to contributed projects also. I know especially contributed projects thinking about doing upgrades to Drupal 8 have been organizing sprints themselves. So keep in mind that we could be talking about core or we could be talking about contrib. I'll give you a little bit of background, some examples of what's been successful in the past, some ideas about what should happen in the sprint, a little bit about what the DA is doing right now. So those are sort of the high level things we'll touch on. Hopefully we will get that part of it done in about 30 minutes so that we have plenty of time for conversation, this being core conversations, we would like actual feedback from people that have organized events or thinking about organizing events in terms of what you found successful or what you're worried about. So the audience for this talk is really decision makers and organizations who might be thinking about funding a sprint, local organizers, so if you're thinking about organizing a sprint or you've organized other events then you want to know how organizing a sprint is different than organizing like a camp or something else. If you're a contributor and you haven't participated in one of these sorts of sprints you want to know how this might be different than let's say the sprint to the end of DuPocon and organize it as said, if you've organized something like this before we'd appreciate your feedback, contrib maintainers who want to organize a sprint around their module and finally something we'll touch on at the end is especially project managers so if you are not actually technical in terms of writing code but technical in terms of helping manage projects we think that your skills are currently under valued and will be really helpful in these sorts of events. So just and then on the flip side if you're not yet a contributor and just want to know what sprints are about or you're like a business sales marketing person who's not making decisions about funding events you're welcome to stay but this might not have a lot of relevance for you so feel free to get up and walk out. So the goals for this talk was said to help people planning sprints to provoke your conversation, let Kathy and I give you some of our opinionated opinions about what makes sprints good and hopefully you know improve the trajectory for DuPocon and contrib. So the goal moving open-source project forward. So a sprint as you guys probably already know is sort of a focused effort for a short period of time. Generally the sprints we're talking about last you know two to three days up to a week I would say anything longer than that is not no longer really a code sprint but a job so at the end of DuPocon there's a tradition of having a huge sprint and as time has gone on this is focused more and more on new contributors so mentoring, getting people organized, celebrating people who are getting involved for the first time, making sure they're set up. So there are also smaller groups doing sort of focus sprinting but it's really only one day and often you know they don't have time to achieve sort of large goals but it is a good chance for a lot of people to come together. So some of the things you know that we're talking about will apply to that big DuPocon sprint or other large event sprints but you know for the most part what we want to talk about is a focus sprint. So that's where you have a small group of people you know the number of people basically will fit in one room and they're there for those two, three, four, five days working together to try to get some things done. So just as sort of a big picture if you guys probably know where we are in the beta DuPo 8 release cycle is currently in the beta phase so we are trying to get down to zero criticals. That's where a lot of these focus sprints have been organized around is trying to knock that number down to zero because we need to get to zero so you can get a release candidate. What you might see if you look in detail in this image is that when we get to release candidate we actually expect that there will be more criticals found and then that's also one of the important things to address with these sorts of events is not only looking at critical issues but looking at things that people have rated high as bugs because oftentimes if you start digging into a highly rated bug and not critical you'll discover it's critical. Conversely you might dig into a critical and discover really it's not so bad it's not going to impact the release severely we could get back to it later and you could downgrade it and stop blocking the release candidate. So addressing both these categories of bugs is important at these sorts of sprints. So in terms of how these things work well there's a few things that we want to go over that we think we can agree on. So these should be non-controversial like you organized the event just you know make sure these are sort of your check boxes that you have in your planning phase. So and then after that we'll come back to things that we think are maybe more controversial or things that you wouldn't necessarily know as being obvious. So the the biggest and most important thing is to have a good venue and sort of everything that goes with that in terms of facilities in terms of keeping people watered and fed. So you need a dedicated space to make this kind of event successful don't try to do it in a coffee shop don't try to do it someplace where there's going to be you know distraction people walking through you know if necessary that means you might have to pay for space and that is probably okay in terms of making the event a success. Obviously power strips tables and chairs so that people need to be comfortable they need to be able to face each other have conversations move the chairs around as their needs change during the day. Beverages you know coffee as we heard this morning the keynote the biggest complaint from yesterday was that the coffee service got cut short so make sure you have as best as possible you know either provide to the sprinters or have available someplace for them to get beverages. If you're serving beer wine later in the day make sure to get some good quality non-alcoholic beverages also so that people don't feel excluded if they don't want to drink and natural light so it's funny I talked to someone who was like oh you want to sprint you want a basement space right you want like a cave I'm like no that is exactly not what I want when I'm sprinting I want natural light I want to you know recover from my jet lag because probably I traveled there I want to be able to get a sense of how the day is going what the weather is you know I want to stay awake and that's what natural light helps do for people so you know don't don't pick a basement cave you should have writing boards whiteboard something that people can collaboratively scribble on so the the sort of collaborative whiteboarding moments can actually be the most productive moments of the entire sprint so make sure that you have made some facility for that don't don't leave that as catch as catch can and finally climate control again you want people to be comfortable nice as with natural light natural air can be very useful for keeping people awake if not at least make sure that that you have some the space is going to be comfortable people aren't going to be sweating or freezing if you organize the event parking can be important so people are going to come and go during the day don't make them you know walk a mile if they had to had to drive there and the thing that obviously you know but we'll just say it is internet if there isn't good internet for your event Wi-Fi is obviously more convenient you should have a wired backup you should really spend time checking out the venue beforehand make sure that it will hold up to even you know a dozen people doing hardcore work you should talk to free node if you're going to have a fairly large event because they will sometimes block people if everyone connects to IRC from one IP address and you should tell the Drupal Association infrastructure team because if you're really posting a lot of poor patches they may need to actually add more test spots so you need to have that sort of channel lined up ahead of time so you know who to reach out to in case the test bots get backed up so people aren't sitting around all day just waiting to see if their patch passed food and important if if you can bring food into the venue that can be good to help people people keep working deconstructed food which is like you know assemble your own sandwich salad something is very a great way to go if you can because that lets everyone meet their own needs and then you don't have to have separate lines or separate things prepared ahead time for the vegans the vegetarians the I don't know paleos wherever they are and it's also great if you know the sprint is in the location where people can go out and quickly get dinner and come back so they don't feel like once they've left the sprint that they're done for the day so that's kind of the things we hope we could all agree on this is the take on that cat who's gonna expound upon right so the a lot of the people who are at sprints are there on their own time and we want to respect them as people and what they're offering and what they've had to go through to get there and so really matters that things are convenient and high quality it helps to do some super fun things at events and between events to keep people communicating and working really well together so having colorful pictures helps organize things and also is fun we have all different kinds of ways of identifying people at sprints sometimes we use t-shirts bunny ears lays people travel from far away and we have a tradition of bringing chocolates from your home country and then sharing them with the other people at the sprint and it's really nice because it like reinforces the differences that we have but when we come together it's it's nice and fun we don't work all day so integrating something from the local area into the day is nice and provides a good break we mentioned like being able to go out for dinner and come back breaking for lunch and having some really good food the conversations that we have when we're not tied to our computer screens can be really brilliant things so we want to facilitate that all right so like I'm Kathy and this is Peter but like who the heck are we to talk about sprint planning we go to a lot of sprints and we plan a lot of sprints so a lot of these things that we're going to recommend have been things that have worked for us in recent sprints dev days at the New Jersey Sprint Drupal cons so okay so we're gonna start with things that you just may not know you're just like oh I didn't know that you did that when you were planning a sprint but that really makes sense I'm gonna do that too okay so how the heck do sprints come about right is it just a calendar thing on a meetup and then people show up no so somebody has to have the idea to have a sprint and the triggers are usually that someone has like this overwhelming burning desire to get a particular thing done like it's bothering them they're thinking of it all the time and they're like we really need to address this maintainers or release managers will be aware of gaps in the current work that's being done and they'll be like oh you know we're doing really good on these issues but nobody's looking at these the topic could be something that you want to use getting together in the same physical space to do so it might be some kind of problem that's really vaguely defined or super scary and is not moving forward organically on its own another trigger for holding a sprint can be that funding is available either through local companies getting some sponsors or through like D8 accelerates then the sprint will often use that for plane tickets to bring people in having people have a hotel room and paint for food at the sprint the more planning we do better the event is gonna come off so one thing is right before the sprint is identify a topic area get it's not just like hey let's work on Triple 8 that's not good enough so get a specific area and then identify specific goals within that area doing work ahead of time weeks ahead of time within that special focus looking at the issues and triaging them making sure their issue summaries are up to date relating them together providing context is gonna make the sprint much more effective when people arrived to work there one of the things to do during this is to identify which issues are blocking which other issues it helps during the planning to have contact with a committer to your project you can get advanced buy-in from a committer like hey we were thinking of having a sprint do you think that's a good idea they can provide a lot of like overview guidance to make sure we're going in the right direction the other thing you can do when you talk to the committer during the planning process is you can ask them if they are available to attend and what days and or if they might be available to attend remotely because when you're working really fast and you have all these people going together and you have issues that are blocking other issues having a responsive committers is like amazing we're really lucky in triple eight because we have committers that are just kind of always responsive our RTB CQ is under control most of the time mostly due to Alex but all the committers are like paying attention to that but it can make even more difference when you have a focused sprint to just touch base with them and let them know it's happening in advance so three week out timeline for this advanced planning defining focus identifying and inviting attendees doing some hangouts with the technical lead and maybe a maintainer or somebody else who's like project managing the sprint to make sure things are going well one week out do another check-in have some initial debates about the issues like is this really blocking this what is this really about I don't understand this thing and getting that done ahead of time before you have all these people arrive you want to have one or two domain experts if they can if they can work a few days in advance especially on like maybe there's one blocking issue that will unblock all these other things that can really help out a sprint doing this planning takes time so the organizer is going to be doing all this volunteering or logistical planning so like it could be like four people and like getting together and talking for like nine hours that's a lot of hours and maybe doing some of that initial work on the blocking issues could be like another four people like working ten hours on some issues in advance of the sprint so during this time you can work on your funding check on grant applications maybe if it's in correlation with a camp you might be using some of the camp money get logistics arranged for the people who are going to fly in pay for those things find hotels airplane tickets all right so at the actual sprint these things really help the sprint be effective keep track of the issues that are within the scope of the project and their status in a way where everybody can see it so like boards on the wall work really well for that keep track of which is blocking which who is working on them and you can have more than one person working on the same issue and what still remains on the issue that needs to be done any work that gets done in that room still also needs to be posted back up on the issue this is good for documenting things so we can see how the issue evolves over the days but really good at communicating with people who are remote because even though you might be having your sprint locally there are people all over the world paying attention to these issues and we don't want to keep the information that we have in the room secret from them we want to have good communication from them this is really beneficial because like when we go to sleep the other part of the world wakes up and they can work on things and then when we wake up we've got more progress and that can't happen if we don't post updates in public on the issues but good times to do that are like right before you break for a meal so right before lunch like upload your broken things and make a comment being like I wasn't sure about this and maybe this coming back to this later right before dinner like whenever you're just stopping work for a while your future self will thank you because you will have forgotten what you were thinking that so it's good for communicating with the world and also yourself so even with a small sprint there's going to be a lot of different things happening and so we want to be communicating really well throughout the day and checking in with the different people working on different issues asking them like what's blocking them what do they need and then trying to get them their help sometimes people who are working get a little heads down and try and like solve things themselves where's a little bit of help from outside can help speed up what they're doing and we also want to check on the test spots and make sure that the tests are running okay and we want to take pictures documenting the sprint is great because usually sprints are energizing fun productive and the people who are there they want to look back on that and be like yeah that was awesome when we did that and remember we did that that was so great so it's good for that and it's also good for communicating with other people outside because somebody could be like listening to the chatter about the sprint and when they see pictures of it they know what it's like that makes them less afraid to attend one in the future so you're not taking pictures to keep people to come to your current event you're taking pictures so that you might get people coming to your next one all right at the end of each day it is super duper helpful to have one person just right like a summary this is all the stuff we got done these things still need to be done we're really unsure about this and just post it up there this makes a final report at the end of the sprint much easier to compile it keeps attendees up to speed so if I'm working on one thing I don't know what these six other people are doing I can even at the event read the summary of the day and be like oh okay that's cool and when we write things down like that it allows us to celebrate the successes that we've had because what we tend to be focusing on is what is broken and what we need to do next and it's really good for humans to be like yeah look at all that we got done after the event we want to communicate what happened this is sometimes required depending upon your funding that you got so it might be required by a grant or if a company gave you money they may have done it in exchange for you writing a blog about the event and putting it up on their website writing write-ups like these are enrich the community knowledge and help transfer that to future sprints so this is really good investment after the sprint there's still more work to be done and there's the work after the sprint can be really effective and a significant part of what happens so you want to check on issues that got really close but aren't yet committed and see what's blocking them and just nudge them along like finish that off because you invested so much work at the sprint you want it to pay off so you've probably heard about this program a few times at the conference already it it's a great example of how the Drupal situation is trying to push Drupal 8 forward I don't have people around during Drupal 7 but the sort of last few months of development before release candidate are the hardest because the the problems are no longer fun the problems are just difficult so it's it you know you need the this sort of impetus and and ability to to hold these rents I think is going to get Drupal 8 done much faster than it would otherwise as we said these sort of events are to push forward those issues that are not getting solved organically so there's a link here if you want to donate and haven't but also if you're thinking about organizing one of these sprints you should definitely apply for a grant the New Jersey Sprint that Kathy mentioned was a really we applied almost as soon as the program was open so we got like one of the first grants and that was sort of exciting also gave us avenues directly to people like Angie who then got involved and helped us move all those issues forward on a daily basis yeah so the link for that is crowdrise.com slash d8 accelerate okay so I think nothing we said so far probably is too controversial so this last section was the things that we thought you might not know but we found to be really important and then we wanted to put together a few things that we thought might be a little more provocative hopefully you will have opinions and agree or disagree and we can have some discussion about that so one of the things that I think is maybe a little controversial is that you really need to focus on getting specific people to your sprint so even before you pick a date you need to be reaching out to the sprinters and you need to adjust the dates of the event to the sprinters if possible make a list of people you must have at the event make that you have sort of the entire event conditional on those people rather than defining event and then hoping that they will show up if you get some of those people to confirm they will also trigger additional participants to come so and you know once you've gotten some of those people to confirm publish their names make sure that they are okay with you saying this person is committed to come on these days it's gonna be really exciting because you'll get to work with you know Daniel Wayner or Tim Plunkett or Kathy you know someone who's who's an exciting person to be in the room with because they get a lot done so again the people are the key those key people and not the date when you organize an event again we've mentioned this several times but I think so you know I want to hear if people agree or disagree with the fact that having this strong communication with a committer is essential for the event to be successful so the you should it with a contribute project you can reach out directly to the contrib maintainer for core you need to get in touch with one of the core committers or ideally a couple of them since they may have gaps in their coverage if at all possible get them to attend so going to things like dev days are great because you usually get a couple two or three committers in the room and you know it's amazing how fast things get done when you're sitting next to the committee like that's ready to go it's blocking this thing and they just commit it to core you can move on to the next issue you don't have to wait for them to notice that it's in the RTBC queue they just commit it well after reviewing it they just commit it when it's ready to be committed but it's not like you have to wait a day for them to review the queue just checking thanks for the clarification Kevin yes nothing just goes in maybe a one-line typo and you know a flip side of that is that you should be recruiting for your sprint people that have relationships already with the committers either the contribute project lead ideally gets contribute project lead to your sprint or get someone they've worked with before or get someone who has a good relationship with one or more of the core committers you know who has their direct personal email address you know their cell phone number whatever it takes against you have this open communication channel and you're not blocked waiting for issues to go in when they're ready so again keep hammering in this you need to ask particular people the flip side of this which might be a little controversial is that you need to be prepared to say no to some people so if you're holding a focused sprint and you have someone who says you know what I I've heard about this Drupal thing I want to come and get my machine set up and really help you you know you should be prepared and you know we've done this at a couple of events recently just say you know what that's this is not the event for you I appreciate that you're interested here's another event where you can do that where you can get set up and get started but this is going to be a focused event and we basically need everyone to come in already up to speed working on core they don't have to be subject area experts in fact sometimes it's great to have some people who are sort of generalists there who are going to work on issues as needed are going to work on the issue summaries are going to understand how the whole process works see the whole sprint doesn't have to be the key people but everyone at the sprint should really be up to speed on on day one walking in the door and that's going to mean you don't get distracted trying to help people you know debug their local lamp stack so just as an example at the New Jersey Sprint I would say two or three of the people were sort of more generalists out of about ten and that was it that was a good mix because those people could pick up the sort of a lot of the smaller issues could move patches forward could fix things that were sort of obviously in need of fixing without having to have a huge deep background whereas the people with deep background kind of get the basic fix in place and then kind of move between issues moving them forward as some of the other people jumped in and dealt with the smaller things dealt with writing tests you know the writing test was often the most important thing of getting a patch right so but you don't necessarily have to be the deep subject area to understand subject matter expert to understand you know what's supposed to happen and how to write a test to test it again focus means not mixing and mentoring as I said in the last slide if people are going to come in the door and need to be mentored you should probably divert them to different events and finally and maybe this is sort of a big a big take home message is that in order to make one of these events successful you're targeting these key participants and they need to trust you as the event organizer that their time is not going to be wasted so you know it might feel like it's we're talking about a lot of time invested upfront to get this event right you know Kathy was saying you know at least four people you probably you know nine hours over the few each or more of the few weeks beforehand plus you know hours working on the issues before the sprint happens so if but that's really essential so the people showing up feel like they're gonna have a very productive time at the sprint because all the ground lake work has been laid for them so just be aware if you're organizing one of the sprints it's not that just the logistics of it really all this pre-planning issue triaging communication ahead of time laying the groundwork for success that we can celebrate at the end of the sprint is what's going to make it successful so and then coming back to something we said at the beginning is about project management and so I think this is an area where I've at least felt real gaps at some of the most recent sprints in the sense that we didn't have someone whose sole role it was to be a project manager we ended up basically dumping this role on someone who was also a subject expert or a committer and so that that person spent a lot of their time managing the sprint managing issues keeping track of things writing summaries which was really great but it meant that one person was basically double burdened and get kind of burned out by the end of the sprint so I think that an area where we could really use help if is from project managers or people with that kind of skill set who might not be interested in writing patches but are willing to show up to sprints and help keep the technical issues on track so you know and I'm not sure if we can get volunteers to do that and this is again sort of a controversial issue that I'd like to have people's opinions on do we need to pay project managers for sprints you know what would the cost of that be if we're paying them a hundred dollars an hour for eight hours times however many days of the sprint is that a worthwhile investment out of let's say your grant money to get someone to do that as a paid project manager or are there people who have those skills that would be willing to show up that just don't know that they're needed so that's you know maybe it's also something the DA should be looking at should the DA have a sort of a stable or a set of you know professional staff that do this sort of logistical technical logistical project management should they be you know flying around the country going to different sprints you know on the DA's budget again these are things we want your feedback on discussion you know should we have a really logistical experts as as part of the DA so finally and I think Kathy's mentioned this several times you know the human element in all these Drupal events the Drupal community is really essential you have a lot of volunteers giving their time so don't make them bitter burned out and sad so you know don't ask people to also to volunteer and also pay for the event don't be afraid to go out looking for sponsors asking for money and you know allow people basically to have their own lives if they need to show up at 10 a.m. and leave at 5 despite the fact that the rest of you are working all evening that's okay like let them have their family life let them do what they need to do don't you know sort of step back and just recognize that any contribution you get is valuable and and should be appreciated finally and Kathy mentioned you know that basically there's follow-up at the end of the sprint and that follow-up can actually be I think the thing that's more important than what actually happens in the room so a lot of times being in the room together with that group of people allows you to form a consensus and that consensus and that plan can form the basis of work that goes on for literally months afterwards so you know the other thing to think about is that you know again you want to motivate people make them feel good about what happened to the sprint so they do basically continue to volunteer their time their own free time after the sprint you keep moving the issues forward that got started the sprint but maybe not finished and I just as an example in I went to DevDate in Hungary and and we basically sat down with Daniel Weiner and he and I came up with a plan that we were gonna rewrite an entire core subsystem was that plan number one or two or three I don't remember we had several plans we did but we had we came up with a plan and basically it took us I would say until so that was like March and we finished issues in like July so we you know we basically had the first idea as we came to consensus and then we you know took us that long to actually execute the plan but without being together in the same room with that sprint we would never had formulated the plan never be able to come to consensus and you know that basically form the work of the next six months of work so I think we're we still have at least 15 minutes right so I'm yeah so we have we're supposed to be done in 1145 we got started a little late so we could maybe eke out another extra five minutes we've got plenty of time so to add your comment or question please come to the microphone so that we can capture it for the recording Alina's taking notes up here so we can record any like good things that we want to remember for later yeah so it's okay formulate your thoughts will wait oh if you can if you could start by saying your your name and your Drupal name that would really help me how's the sound level okay mm-hmm hi I'm John Weigstner from the Western New York Drupal user group and I'm JPW 1116 and I can't thank you enough for emphasizing putting on top of the heap internet as as one of the criteria among your utilities speaking from experience I had a facilities manager who was very you know friendly and accommodating at first say yes we have internet no problem which meant tethering off of her cell phone so that brings up the point and oh and by the way she also would not allow extension cords because it was an historic structure and they didn't want any tape on their wooden floors so my point being if you get all that information ahead of time is there a specific number for bandwidth yes and also you don't know how many attendees you will have and usually the person is so myopic they don't know what Drupal is they just need to know how big a pipe right so some of the things like we talked we said in the beginning some of the things about a focus sprint are similar to some of the more like giant sprints that we do so we have a page for sprint planners where we document some of this some of these things and it's on Drupal dot org it's slash core dash mentoring slash sprint dash resources you can just Google core mentoring and then there's it's a child page at the bottom and one of the nice thing that's on here is what is the internet that you need so you should plan on enough access points that have enough capacity for two and a half devices per person you want the bandwidth limits per device should be no more no less than a hundred megabits per person what is that wrong no I guess it's I'm I'm not good at reading numbers it's ten there's only one zero there I have I have other excellent skills for a sprint about a hundred people you went 60 to 80 megabits down and 20 megabits up and that'll handle 300 to 400 devices so depending upon the size you can you can scale that for what you need but all this is written down on this doc and it this has come at the reason this is here is because over the years that summary doc that people wrote up after events started to include what they used so we had this stuff this is how it went and then another event would write up their summary of their sprint we had this stuff this is how it went and so we were able to take that information and make a canonical source that then people can find so this is another reason why the document in your sprint is really important thank you and can I ask a quick follow-up then sure when you said focus means not mixing in mentoring and if the attendees need help in another event can you address something called a learning sprint because if you want to bring the next generation of sprint participants on maybe that would be something yeah thank you so I think one of your topics can like if you're gonna have a focus sprint your focus could be onboarding new contributors and we have those so I run I run a monthly sprint locally that does that I also help organize sprints at Drupal cons that do that so on Friday we'll have between 200 and 300 people who've never contributed to core before and that's what we'll be doing we'll be onboarding them but what that does is that ensures that your open source project is healthy far into the future and what we were talking about today is what we need to get done in the next two months so those events are really important but they're they're slightly different they require some different planning and logistics but what does work pretty well like we mentioned was to have experts like a majority of experts and to have just a couple people who kind of know what they're doing but not really and so that's like a little bit of both then it's it's organic mentoring it's not formal mentoring there's no like go here and watch this presentation and we will teach you things right it's like no sit down at this table and do whatever we tell you and ask us questions and we will help you help us and that's informal mentoring and that happens in the Drupal community all the time we don't like because it's ingrained in our culture that's how we work when we sit down together my name is Levi Sigworth Drupal.org user wheat penny and my question for you is if you could expand further on the project management needs that you have specifically around what actions a project manager would be doing to help facilitate the work that is happening so I don't really know what project manager does but I asked a project manager once I asked Shannon Ventus who I greatly respect and she told me that one of the ways she described it was project managers communicate with others to find out what is blocking them and then they help that person get whatever they need. So yeah I would say examples from the last couple sprints you know just tracking the status of issues who's working on what issue what issues are you know where in progress which ones are blocked those daily summaries getting making sure people are posting their issue updates so like for New Jersey we had we ended up having Angie basically write the daily summary which was like really helpful but it's like wait she's a court-committer and she's like basically helping us manage project you know like in Montpellier we had Wim Lierz basically running around putting post-it notes up you know tracking the status of issues which was great but it meant that he couldn't do any actually coding for like three days he was just tracking things and so it was really it was too much to ask yeah it's not like Wim can't do that right it's just like we were asking him to do like three things yeah yeah so you know and then you know just behind you had those amazing you know boards in Dev Days in Hungary you know tracking all the issues but again it's like that meant that her time wasn't spent on code it was spent on you know moving moving you know the actual sprint board kind of stickies from one place to the next so that's really a full-time job if you want someone to do that well and it would be helpful to have people committed to doing that part of it at a lot of the sprints yeah that's very helpful I hadn't that's something I hadn't considered before for sprints thank you thanks so my name is Jess I'm exjamm on Drupal.org I'm a release manager for Drupal 8 full-time in my job and for the past month I'm one of the aforementioned six court-committers that they want you to have every single event which I'll go to in a second I actually wanted to address the question about project managers though because I think that that's the like this is the thing that's the biggest unsolved problem for me in terms of our sprints on the one hand I like I've had very mixed experiences trying to to bring project managers into the work that we do in at sprints and in Drupal in general I think sprints are better but a lot of times the unpredictable resources and unfixed timelines that we have in open source projects are a big challenge for project managers who are used to managing agile sprints where they control the resources and they can make smart decisions and so forth and so it's it's been a struggle but at the very minimum having someone who will go up to you and say you know you know what is it that you need to solve this and then document that and move it forward the the big challenge though is that I find that there's a certain minimum level of big picture technical understanding that's necessary in order to distill that information yeah we need a special flower like like me or Angie you're right but somebody with somebody with previous experience yes like that we don't invite new contributors to these focused sprints we shouldn't invite new project managers if they're new to core right it's the same it's the same thing we need those roles but we also need people who have experience already in whatever project it is like core or working on contribute or like any another project that is in Drupal right like whatever your sprint is about they need that context and I I will also say that and this prob the experience probably helps with that is there needs to be trust between the person who's doing the project management and the contributors at the sprint and the technical experts like there there are times when I will listen to sprinters say what they need and it's like actually no that's not what you're saying and they'll try to like handle wave over some technical solution that they want to get done but actually isn't really a requirement to complete in the project and so that's it's really difficult and it's something that I feel like so in in my my full-time job I consider myself a developer I've been a programmer for 16 years or whatever but I keep kind of getting pushed into this role of doing managing things and it's not it's not that I trained for it and it's not that I'm particularly good at it it's just that you know there's a gap there and no one else is doing it and I have the technical expertise and sufficient like that trust in relationship with the developers who are doing the work that makes it so that I can do a path little job of it even though it's not not my strong sense here so if anyone has ideas about that I think I really don't know what to do for the part though is other than having like hybrid people who have some familiarity with with droop like core and and ramping them up and then right so there's so there's a possibility that when we invite people to sprints we make it very clear what role we're inviting them for so it's not necessarily so we could invite somebody with domain knowledge but say we're asking you to come and fill the role of project I mean we shouldn't call it project managing you should think something else but like do the project managing for the thing so they're clear what we're looking for them to do and they can decide whether they want to come to the event and do that or if they're like man I ain't working on code I ain't coming right like we should be clear with them when we're communicating in advance another way of phrasing this is and this is something that I think that or another way of another part of this a person a role that you can have that I think Kathy is really good about recruiting is having someone who just does what you ask them right like if you have dear God yes if you have you know you're you're at a sprint and like there's something that's in your way anything from not having coffee in the room to a communication problem with the developer who's not present at the sprint like all of those things are you have to stop what you're doing take your time away from the specific technical problem that you're trying to solve and then go solve this other non-technical thing right so like Jared Jared Smith is awesome at that he's super technical he can do all the things and but if he's at an event and you need something you tell him what you need like hey I need you rewrite this Docker thing for us right now he's like okay you're like hey we don't have any coffee he's like I got it right like he will just he doesn't care he doesn't have any kind of ego in his way he wants the project to move forward and he'll do whatever you need done people like that are amazing right like I need you to write a test for this issue I need you to write a change notice I need you to re-architect the whole entire thing like you don't need specific people necessarily for that like a person can find the person who will do that thing for you yeah so those kinds of people like are awesome and so I think I think that when we talk about project manager we're talking more about that enabling part of it as opposed to the these the sort of high level structured planning and and like technical debt management and stuff like that I think I think we're talking more about the the like the example of the person who just has the thing that you need and brings it to you and to me it's kind of magical as a developer but if anyone has more ideas on that I would I would like I think that it would be really valuable you know to invite people who have expertise in this kind of planning to come to events and to sit down see how we work and see if they have a way that they can help because we a lot of us are developers and we don't have that expertise and so we don't really know we've learned kind of by doing what works and what doesn't but we don't really have a strong feeling for it I do have I have a couple other things that I wanted to mention I've taken a page from Kathy's book so I just took down a couple of other small notes one was the gentleman left already he asked about estimating how many attendees there are I just wanted to mention that a good way to estimate how many attendees you'll have is take the number of people sign up and double it usually safe but and it actually like bears out in the history of the events are you thinking of Ghent I'm thinking of well actually get we were a little stricter but in general like take the number of people that sign up and double it and then you have enough bandwidth but you're not spending overly too much I see what you mean and then also someone else had asked a question I don't see was it my question about the two different kinds of splints Prince I just wanted to like Claire like add to what Kathy said like we kind of consider onboarding new contributors a solved problem in the Drupal community like there's a lot of work there's a lot of pain points that we still need to address there's we can always improve it we can always make it easier for new people to get involved but like we've we have done so much work over the past four years that we actually like we have a ton of documentation on triple dot org about this so if you if you want to do a sprint where you want to bring in new contributors and that's your goal you want to you know just learn about about whatever project together whether it's a Drupal core project Drupal contrib or another open source project like we have lots of advice for you look at look at triple dot org you know ask in IRC a pink Kathy we can give you will shower you with information actually and then the harder part is to slide like absorbing all of it right the other thing about that that you mentioned was that there are some pain points still involved even though we have solved the problem of how to get new contributors in and if you're interested in the pain points Alina and I did a presentation yesterday and the recording is up and our speaker notes are up and that's on the that's on the con site and it's node four three nine in case you want to look at some of the ideas that we had for the pain points that are going to be more most effective to address okay Jess and then one more one final thing I just so as I mentioned I'm for the past month I'm one of the six core committers for triple core and and everyone says all the time it's really great to have a committer at your event you have a committer at your event I want to kind of walk that back a little bit and say for you if you want to do a sprint at your local camp you do not need a committer to be successful whether if you're doing a sprint that's focused on I want to accomplish these specific goals for this specific project it's very good to get buy-in from the maintainer from that project but if you want to do a sprint on core issues you don't need you don't need a core committer there like your your issues will get reviewed within a few days if you're doing something that's on a like a high pressure highly technical big investment focus sprint then in that case it makes so like that yeah so I think like part of the like in like idea for this talk came from me hearing people say like oh I really want to help triple eight get released faster I should hold a sprint and I'm like please don't like you should hold a sprint it's gonna enrich your community you're gonna find it to be a really valuable experience it you're gonna enjoy it it's gonna be great but if you want to help triple eight get released faster you're like I would like to you know move it up by a month by holding a sprint like then you need to think of some very specific things the things that we've been talking about but this applies not just to core but also for contrib so if you're a maintainer of panels and you want to get a stable release out then you're gonna be really focused on scoping your issues and like working on that thing and having some advanced communication with a maintainer in panels is gonna help whether or not they can actually attend your event I mean you need to talk to them about it and talk about whether or not it's needed right but you want to think about whether or not it's needed and you want to think about the goal of your sprint there's a lot of different kinds of sprints and they all serve a different purpose yes hi I'm John Paul McNeil PZ on Drupal.org and I have a quick plug and then a question sure we're having a focused sprint June 5th 6 and 7th Portsmouth New Hampshire everyone's welcome to come and we realize not everyone can get to Portsmouth New Hampshire so we are also having a remote option so I'm wondering if you have any suggestions for for folks who might not be able to make it physically but still have them feel involved in the sprint so communicate which issues you want to address during your sprint provide some list a short list people are overwhelmed if you just like we're gonna work on a project make sure that anything that you do in person gets posted back to the issue fairly frequently so every couple hours like this is the new patch this is the inner diff this is what I'm working on next right so really good communication outside have some way to have real-time communication with people who are remote I highly recommend that you use a public IRC channel for that you can use Drupal-contribute if it's a Drupal related thing if that channel gets busy there are subtopical channels so you might have another thing but do it in public don't use like some chat thingy that blotted it up use use IRC for that please use IRC because it's written that lets people whose bandwidth sucks still participate in the conversation it also lets people follow the conversation on and off while they're working on issues so they can work be deep in thought for 20 minutes snap out of it check IRC see what's been going on and then they can get back down in if it's an audio Google hangout kind of thing that's impossible so that would be my recommendations for getting remote people involved with your local people and like the daily summaries every day right so just lots of communication and their communicate your narrow focus and also have some public real-time typing communication okay thanks that's it thanks for coming so please evaluate us tell us what you thought whether this was helpful or not helpful and yeah there's a link there's a link to the presentation from the node page on the event site and we can also post like a summary of the notes that we have from the conversation there it's not it's not public I you can use whatever you want they'll be pros and cons to it so if you use Slack you might get more people like using it because they hate IRC and they'd be willing to use Slack where they won't use IRC but we can't discover that Slack channel right if you're using if you're talking about issues in like panels and you're in the panels IRC channel people are like it's already established that that's the place where people talk and so if you make a new place that might work well for the day but you're missing the opportunity for other people to participate in that conversation at a sprint at a focused event those people are already committed to being there they may not like it but they will install an IRC client if that's what you're using it's not easier it's what we use and we don't like to fragment our conversations because then we can't learn from each other we can't help each other so we want to have the conversations where the conversations already are you know what we have a big remote sprint we have another kind of sprint which didn't come up today in the conversation which is the global sprint weekend that we do once a year and those are super nice those are great like that's a great first time sprint to hold if you've never held a sprint before because the whole idea is that you're holding it close to you so you don't have to travel very far it's super small so it's gonna be like 48 people so you're not like overwhelmed with everything right and you're holding it at the same time as 48 other cities in the world and so you can like ask other organizers you know like what are we doing about this what are we doing about that like it's so keep your eye on January next year and and you know hold a sprint before that like you know don't let like don't be like oh Kathy said I couldn't hold one until January don't do that but keep your eye on January that's really great and and just start starts super small right the only the only trouble with doing it more than once a year is I organize it so if you want to organize a global sprint day on another day in the year you like anybody can but it's crap ton of work because you've got to communicate all these things in advance like the same stuff that we were talking about here like you got blog posts to write document patient pages to update you know people to recruit you you ask them to like you know make an event but they don't make an event so then you have to follow up with them to make an event so that it shows up on Drupal like having like a global sprint day another one during the year would be great you just have to find somebody who has the bandwidth to do all of the logistics planning for it hmm yeah so like if if you're interested in that or you know somebody who's interested in that I would love to talk with them about it like I can help them I can answer any questions that they have I can point them to resources and you know like enable that to happen because they're really great sprints they're like in the middle of these big Drupal cons right or these tiny little things that we were talking about today because they're small they're kind of focused but they're super local and you do a lot of onboarding with new people like they're great events I wish we had more people who could take that role on what's your name