17  Roles and responsibilities

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In a larger project there are many tasks and needs to be done, many more than any individual person can handle at any one time. To manage this, we describe specific responsibilities that need to be done within DP-Next and assign them to people so that people’s roles are clear and they know what they are responsible for.

17.1 Roadmap management

A roadmap is a set of products, milestones, and timelines necessary to complete a particular project. In our case, a project would be an individual work package.

An effectively developed and regularly maintained roadmap is critical for successful and timely completion of a project. But they aren’t just for planning purposes, they also are extremely effective at communicating the project’s status, next steps, progress, and direction to everyone involved in the project. It keeps everyone aligned and makes it clearer what needs to be done.

Because roadmaps are so important and require regular maintenance and management, someone needs to be responsible for them. The roadmap manager’s tasks are:

  • Identify all concrete products for a project (one product is one repository) by talking to the collaborators and list them in the roadmap (see how below). This is a critical step, but also can be extremely difficult to do, as knowing clearly what a product is and what products are needed for the project can be hard for collaborators to themselves communicate and agree on. This is part of the responsibility of the roadmap manager to dig in and ask detailed and probing questions. This will be an iterative process, so don’t expect to get clear answers right away.
  • Identify all milestones for each product, again by talking to the collaborators by probing and digging in to get as clear an idea and picture as possible on what needs to be done for each product. Then list them in the roadmap. Like the products, this is something that will need to be done regularly and will evolve over time. So expect to regularly talk with collaborators about milestones and tasks.

We use GitHub Projects to create and manage roadmaps (see some of our roadmaps in our list of project boards). These are some things that we do in the GitHub Projects to manage our roadmaps:

  • Use the roadmap view in GitHub Projects as the main view for the roadmap project board. Group this view by “product” (see below) to see the milestones (see below) grouped by product. This main view should be filtered by -status:Done, so that only active milestones are shown.
  • Create draft issues and use them to represent milestones for a given product. Start and end dates should be put on each milestone.
  • Create a custom, single-select field to represent the project’s products and within that field, add options for each of the products in the project. One product should represent one repository. Each milestone (“draft issue”) should be assigned to a product using this single-select “products” field, so that milestones are grouped by product in the roadmap view.
  • When a milestone is complete, change the status to “Done” so it gets filtered from the main roadmap view.

17.2 Issue management

GitHub Issues are the primary way we track work in DP-Next. We use issues to describe specific tasks that need to be done, to have a place to discuss and brainstorm about particular topics, and come to an agreement or decision for those topics. As a product progresses, more issues are made, often faster than they can be completed. And issues can quickly accumulate, go out-of-date, or be forgotten. Combined with the fact that the priority of any given issue needs to reflect the current state of the roadmap, someone needs to be responsible for curating and managing the issues for a given product. The issue manager’s tasks are:

  • Understand the product enough to create issues that contribute to its completion.
  • Track and ensure issues are completed and closed, by reminding assignees of their issues and checking on the status of issues regularly (ideally during update meetings)
  • Close any issues that are no longer relevant or are out-of-date.
  • Consult the roadmap to identify what issues need to be prioritized in any given period of time.
  • Ensure that the distribution of the issues priorities are balanced. If all issues are high priority, no issue is a high priority. There needs to be a balance between high, medium, and low priority as it reflects an understanding the actual state and needs of the product and overall project.

We use GitHub Issues as well as GitHub Projects to manage our issues. These are some things that we do in GitHub to manage our issues:

  • Use a Board view in GitHub Projects, grouped by “status” to show “todo”, “in progress”, and “done” columns. This is the main view for managing issues. Create “swimlanes” on the board by assignee so each person has their own “lane” to track and manage their own issues.
  • Create a custom, single-select field to represent the issue’s priority and within that field, add options for “high”, “medium”, and “low” priority.
  • Assign priorities to issues using the “priority” field. An easy way to do this is to create a new view (just for the issue manager) that has all the issues grouped by priority. With the grouping, it is easy to drag issues between the different priority levels to assign them. This also makes it easy to see the distribution of priorities across all issues and ensure that they are balanced.
  • Keep the main view (grouping by status and swimlane by assignee) filtered by has:priority, so that only issues with priorities are shown. This helps keep the focus on and communicates to everyone what actually needs to get done.