SAFE Network Dev Update - September 12, 2019

No summary anymore? I liked them because it was a way to remember the main points easily.

11 Likes

Strong progress again and it is great to see the new epics and stories getting added to projects. This sort of visibility is really confidence inspiring and helps enormously when trying to understand project state and progress!

Vaults phase 2 will be awesome and sounds like it will become useable for those not afraid of a little risk!

So much good news - thanks again to the team for knocking down these stories and getting everything in place. Respect due! :slight_smile:

23 Likes

Thanks so much to the entire team for all of their hard work!

20 Likes

This is really exciting news!! A perfect next step coming at just the right time :smile:

This strategic priority is becoming ever more abundantly clear, and I think it’s the wisest move!!

Can we say fireworks!? :sparkler: So great to have a front row seat to this epic show :smile:

28 Likes

I never understood how anyone be confused with milestones.

They’ve simply been called:

  • TEST 1-18
  • Testnets
  • (edit: forgot “sprints”)
  • Alphas & Betas
  • Fleming & Maxwells
  • Phases with sections and subsections
  • Epics (first seen today)
    Etc

Lol just playing with you :joy: I’m sure it helps the team make internal goals and stay on task.

Just a bit daunting for the rest of us as we watch from the outside.

But great stuff it feels very close!

15 Likes

Nice update. If they get a restart/reboot capability, vaults phase 2a (multi-vault single-section) would immediately become a direct competitor to CEPH, BeegFS, and other open source distributed file systems.

20 Likes

I think this has been answered before but unfortunately I dont remember a definitive answer.

If a task is estimated at 3 days.
Is that 3 days for the team to complete or a person?

I think the answer I seek here is… if a projects tasks total a minimum of 9 days and a team of 3 people share the tasks, will the project be completed in 3 days or is the 9 day estimate for the team to complete?

5 Likes

speed quantum hard amazing mind blow away!

blow-me-away

19 Likes

It is common for projects to estimate using based on the number of days a developer will take to deliver a feature. If multiple devs can work on it, the days will be split between them.

So, if an epic is estimated to be 20 dev days, but 4 devs can work on it flat out with no distractions or blockers, it would be delivered in 5 days. Of course, there are always blockers, dependencies, meetings, holidays, sick time, changing priorities, etc, which make this more fluid.

Some places prefer to use story points, but these tend to be correlated to dev days in some way regardless. Most places I’ve worked have tended to use dev days instead for practical reasons.

19 Likes

The surfacing of projects, epics and stories are definitely a sign of the team moving to a more product oriented agile work flow. I suspect @Nadia is driving this and it is a direct outcome of the direction changes we saw earlier in the year.

I for one am extremely pleased to see this. It moves the focus to one of delivery, over r&d. It helps to concentrate the team on what needs to be delivered and when.

For those not briefed in agile workflows, an epic is something which is a large goal, which will be broken down into stories as they become a priority. Stories tend to be from a half day to several days in size and are what the devs work on the deliver. So, a 30 day epic, may become 10 stories, which several devs may work through at the same time.

26 Likes

Vault phase 2. Super exciting. :slight_smile:

13 Likes

Thanks for that @Traktion I was wondering :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

14 Likes

The almost smooth progress of the projects and sub projects is exhilarating to watch on the project plan. It probably hides all the yelling and screaming that happens in the background but the whole team is supported by us, the community, in this Epic endeavour. Epic - thought I’d sneak it in.

18 Likes

Maidsafe presents: More than a decade in the making, a safe network alpha, project “fleming” Phase two-B act 1. Coming to a repository near microsoft in 2020. Or 21.

2 Likes

A little dramatic dont you think.
I have decided to build my own pool, for the same price as having one installed I can do it myself and get 3 times more for the same cost.

Anyway point is I am working my ass off, every minute that I am not working at earning money I am busting my ass building.
To my wife and 3 kids who want the pool yesterday it seems like an neverending project.
Even though they dont constantly criticize how slow I am at delivering the project (which would be very rude) I know they think this is going to end in 2021.

Point is, it has taken me building a pool to fully grasp what Maidsafe is going through while impatient bystanders watch from the sidelines and expect it yesterday.

17 Likes

I’m really sorry. I’m normally careful to not use too much jargon, so everyone can understand but I missed it on ‘Epic’.

@whiteoutmashups I hear what you are saying about milestone confusion and you are right with the goals - so much easier to split big tasks down into smaller chunks of work. Which is exactly what’s being done here:

SAFE Network is the goal, and the names of the ‘smaller chunks of work’ we need to deliver are Fleming, Maxwell and Beta.

Each of those chunks is then broken down further, so for Fleming, the ‘smaller chunks of work’ are BLS, Vaults, node ageing etc… at this stage we’ve called these smaller chunks ‘projects’

Then we take each of them and break them down further … at this stage they are called ‘phases’ (a number of phases make up a project), and then breaking each phase down further we call them ‘Epics’ (which make up phases, which make up a project…). Epics are broken down into stories, and into tasks etc.

Some teams use this lingo, others use a different vocabulary. I’m not ridgid on which one is to be used, just as long as everyone understands the scope, and how it all fits together.

30 Likes

Morning! Thats the links to these post on the forum:

Data types: An Overview of Data Types on the SAFE Network
More information on Phase 1 Vaults: What’s included in Phase 1 Vaults?

17 Likes

@Traktion nailed the answer. Typically we’ll estimate for 1 person to do the work, and if it makes sense for more people to help then it should speed up the delivery. In theory…

But as the saying goes:
" In theory there is no difference between theory and practice . But, in practice , there is."

As you get ‘closer’ to a task, and scope and understand it in more detail, the estimations become adjusted as necesssary. But these initial estimations are always good to have (both for getting an initial feel for complexity, and for lessons learned afterwards ie. why did we over/underestimate)

26 Likes

I certainly can’t say it’s just me driving this - but I’m certainly not against it :wink:

We do have more of a ‘product’ focus lately, but that’s only because we are able to build on the work that’s happened to date. Had that not happened, we wouldn’t be where we are now.

24 Likes

And thanks for the agile description @Traktion, spot on. We also break stories down further in to tasks / sub-tasks etc.

For those who aren’t familiar with this approach - it’s just a way of breaking big pieces of work down into manageable chunks of work so the team can deliver.

18 Likes