For more details about the product vision for Fulfillment, see our Fulfillment page.
The Purchase group manages the Purchase category.
| Person | Role |
|---|---|
| Chris Baus | Backend Engineering Manager, Fulfillment:Purchase |
| Ryan Cobb | Backend Engineer, Fulfillment:Purchase |
| Qingyu Zhao | Senior Backend Engineer, Fulfillment:Purchase |
| Shreyas Agarwal | Senior Backend Engineer, Fulfillment:Purchase |
| Josianne Hyson | Backend Engineer, Fulfillment:Purchase |
The team meets synchronously once per week alternating timezones between EMEA and APAC friendly times. Team members are encouraged to attended the meeting most appropriate for their time zone. Meeting topics include: wins from the past week, problems which are impeding progress in the milestone, and planning and refining of issues.
The Engineering Manager provides a weekly update on the team progress toward the milestone objectives. This should include the weight closed relative to the weight of the entire milestone. This update is added as a comment to the milestone planning issue prior to the weekly team meeting. In case the Engineering Manager is unavailable to provide the weekly update, an alternate team member will be assigned via the #s_fulfillment Slack channel.
It is important for long term planning for the team to accomplish what we agree to at the beginning of the milestone. A significant aspect to completing our planned work is accurately weighting issues. The explanation of weights is specified on the Fulfillment Sub-department page. We further specify, as a baseline, a 5 should roughly take 2 engineering weeks of work to complete. Issues with a weight of 1 should be rare and reserved for cases with no logic changes such as changing the text in a dialog or fixing a comment. A weight of 2 should be used when there are 1 or 2 minor logic changes. Likewise if an issue contains significant unknowns or will span multiple projects and many files, don't hesitate to weight at 8 or higher. This should trigger us to look more closely at breaking the issue into smaller issues, or more closely defining the implementation requirements.
We use the rolling average of the past 3 milestones to determine the total weight of the current milestone. We expect this to increase over time as we weight issues higher and become more familiar with types of work requested.
Optimally we require 2 weeks from the time the issue is created to the time it is weighted. Issues which require refinement will have the workflow::refinement label added by the Product Manager. Issues should be assigned to engineers for weighting before Tuesdays to be ready for review in the weekly sync meeting on Thursdays. When an issue has been refined, the engineer should unassign themselves from the issue. A reminder for engineers to refine issues will be posted to #g_purchase by the Engineering Manager. Prior to the sync meeting engineers should review the issue and add their comments and weights to the issue using the estimation template.
Prior to the weekly sync meeting the Engineering Manager will add issues which don't have a clear weight or in dispute to the meeting agenda. Following the meeting the Engineering Manager will arbitrate any difference and assign the final weight to the issue. After the weight has been assigned, the workflow::refinement label will be removed and the workflow::ready for development label added.
Issues with the Deliverable label assigned to the current Milestone are considered the most vital to the Milestone success. The focus should be on completing these issues ahead of non-deliverable issues. At 7 business days remaining in the Milestone, evaluation of the status of Deliverable issues should be completed by the Engineering Manager. If completion of one or more Deliverable issues is in jeopardy, the Engineering Manager should evaluate if adding more Engineers to those issues will help ensure their completion before the end of the Milestone. If so, multiple Engineers should be assigned to Deliverable issues.
