About

The Ubuntu project is maintained by thousands of people across the world. Monitoring all the work and ensuring deliverables are on track is the task of status.ubuntu.com. This site uses Ubuntu's preferred method of requirements capture, the Launchpad Blueprint, to closely track engineering progress towards its goals.

How to use this site

Navigation

Across the top of this site is the navigation bar. This can be used to see progress of the organisation as a whole or to drill down to specific information such as team and individual work items. If at any time you wish to return to the home page, please use the 'Overview' button.

Image of the navigation bar at the top of all pages on the site. Overview: the front page showing overall progress. About: this page. Teams: a team-by-team breakdown of work. People: a per-person breakdown of work. Milestones: a page for each milestone of the cycle. Marker label 1 Marker label 2 Marker label 3 Marker label 4 Marker label 5

Back to the Home page. General overview of the current cycles progress

A team-by-team breakdown of engineering work

A per-person breakdown of engineering work

Engineering work broken down by major milestone

This page. An explanation of what status.ubuntu.com does

Burndown Charts

note For an explanation of Work Items please see the Ubuntu wiki article: WorkItemsHowto.

Ubuntu's development is done in cycles, each of which is six months in length. This site shows information for the current cycle. To help visualise the work being done in a cycle Ubuntu uses burndown charts. Burndown charts are a part of the Agile SCRUM methodology, tracking individual items of work to their completion. The number of work items are shown in the form of a bar chart and colour coding is used to show the state. The states that are tracked in Ubuntu's burndown charts are:

  • TODO
    • team: Items to do by the team.
    • foreign: Items to be done by someone outside of the team but contributing to an Ubuntu project.
  • BLOCKED
    • team: Items to do by the team that are currenty blocked on something.
    • foreign: Items to be done by someone outside of the team but contributing to an Ubuntu project that are currently blocked on something.
  • INPROGRESS
    • team: Items to do by the team and have been started, but not completed.
    • foreign: Items to be done by someone outside of the team but contributing to an Ubuntu project that have started, but are not complete.
  • DONE
    • team: Completed items done by the team.
    • foreign: Completed items done by someone outside the team, but contributing to an Ubuntu project.
  • POSTPONED
    • team: Items that are to be done by the team which will not be done in the current cycle.
    • foreign: Items to be done by someone outside of the team but contributing to an Ubuntu project that will not be done in the current cycle.

Burndown charts also show the trajectory of team effort. The black line shows ideal progress which, if adhered to, will result in all work items being completed on time.

An example of a burndown chart. The x axis shows time, and the y axis shows the number of workitems. The bars show the number of workitems left to do at each point. The chart continues past the current date to the end of the cycle. A straight black line is drawn from the number of workitems to do at the start of the cycle until zero at the end of the cycle. This line is called the trend line, and shows an idealised progress. Comparing the current number of workitems to do and the recent trend shows whether the project is on track for completion by the end of the cycle

Topics

note For an explanation of how the topics work please see: TopicHowTo.

Ubuntu uses topics to drive its engineering effort. At the start of every six month cycle a set of achievable goals are put forward during the Ubuntu Developer Summit and the Ubuntu community attempts to deliver on them. Topics are further broken down into Blueprints and finally Work Items. Topics can be made up from several Blueprints, each of which contributes to the overall goal.

An example section of the overview page of this site. It shows several topics, with a progress bar showing how complete they are, along with their priority and a description or status note.

Clicking on any topic gives you more information on its requirements including who is working on it, the Blueprints that make it up and the current progress.

An example of a Topic overview. Several parts of the page are highlighted. At the top is a burndown chart showing progress towards that topic over time. Below that is a progress bar showing the current completion as a percentage. Next comes a table showing the engineering blueprints that contribute to the topic, with their progress and summaries. After that is a table showing the people that are working on the topic, along with the counts of workitems that they have completed and have left to do. Lastly there is a table listing every workitem, showing the state and assignee for each. Marker label 6 Marker label 7 Marker label 8 Marker label 9 Marker label 10

Burndown chart towards the current topic

Overall completion of the topic so far

The individual Blueprints that make up the topic

The individuals who are working on the topic

The individual Work Items that make up the topic and further information



Last updated: Wed 16 May 2012, 19:02 UTC