Monday, January 22, 2018

Statistical data in Noi

While doing statistics about our work in 2017, I saw that the MySitesDashboard table needs optimization, it is too slow to have in my dashboard because it does a mydiar of SQL queries for counting all those tickets each time. And actually the number of tickets is only one kind of summary we want to have per site. Another important number (for me) is the number of working hours.

It is now implemented using summary fields (lino.modlib.summaries). This was #2270 (Use summaries for SitesDashboard).

As a side effect I merged the working plugin from noi into xl. Because we no longer have any use case for that differenciation (and because it makes things needlessly complicated).

Another side effect is that also lino_welfare.modlib.esf now generates gross total summaries (i.e. summary records having year=None). And therefore the Summaries tables have hide_sums set to True.

What is a “Site” in Noi anyway?

A lino_xl.lib.tickets.Site in Lino Noi is an important concept for our team in order to organize aur tickets.

It has nothing to do with lino.core.site.Site nor with lino.modlib.system.SiteConfig, it rather means a building site or construction site (German “Baustelle”, French “Chantier”).

What would be a better name? Does a Site in Lino Noi correspond to a Product Backlog Item (PBI) in Scrum? Not exacly, because a PBI should be small enough to be handled during a single sprint. A PBI (according to scruminc.com) can be a “specification”, “requirement”, “use case”, an “epic”, a “user story”, a “bug”, a “chore”, a “timeboxed research task”. Important properties of a PBI are

  • a description

  • a “business value” (determined by the Product Owner).

  • an “estimate” (the relative effort needed to do it. Estimated by the Team)

  • “seqno” (the Product Owner prioritizes PBIs)

A lino_xl.lib.tickets.Site in Lino Noi has a mnemonic name which we use internally to speak about it. It can correspond to

  • a virtual machine with a production site maintained by our team (jane, avanti, cpaschatelet, …)

  • a documentation web site or some part thereof (book, guide,

  • Some long-term project (extjs3, py2to3, …)