Milestones / Labels - cleanup & protocol recommendations

[kelenelee]

These tasks used to be part of #395. This is part of a greater effort to make the Github board less cluttered and less intimidating for newcomers

Labels

• Add descriptions to labels so that people aren't left guessing what they are
• Deleted duplicate or unused labels and milestones, and shortened label names to take up less space.
  • replaced New Issue Approval and Questions/Review columns with label ?
  • shortened priority: high to !. Low and medium priority labels have been deleted, as they weren't used very much, and issues without a priority tend to default to being implicitly understood as low/medium priority.
• Categorized groups of similar labels by emoji and color
  • Colors contrast more to meet WCAG AAA standards. Light colors are light enough to not draw attention away from issue names. Dark label colors are used sparingly for high priority, new issue approval, questions/review.
  • Size point labels are gradients of yellow to communicate length of time. Emoji is hourglass and # of hours of work. Description changed to reflect HfLA schedule, i.e. 6 hours = 1 traditional work day = 1 HfLA week
  • Roles now have the bust silhouette. For now, green is discipline and purple is management.

Milestones

• Deleted milestone Velocity, because onboarding / meeting agendas never end and projects are supposed to progress toward an end goal.
• Reviewed documentation-related issues and created new milestones for them: Project revival for when the project was first being started, Transitioning... for when the team line up was changing a lot in late 2021, and New PM for when Hana left.
• Created a milestone for Figma Foundations usability tests and a milestone for design. As the project evolves, we'll revisit the issue structure and how it might combine with new labels.

[kelenelee]

The initial fixing of the milestones and labels is complete. Right now the original Figma Kit (Foundations) "epic" is still an issue, but it will be moved to the milestone description.

A wiki article is forthcoming with even more detailed explanations for labels and milestones, how they work, and how to create good ones:

• Wiki rewrite #406

Reflections

(Caveat that the following observations were made informally via Zoom meetings, Kanban board usage, and Slack messages, and not an observational study. If there is any way I can accurately test the UX, more formal observations will be done.)

At the start of this cleanup, labels and milestones were not used optimally. They have gone through several changes by trial and error. The changes are listed above in the main body of this issue.

Our team (the end users of the Kanban board) were and are still intimidated or avoidant of Github. This is problematic because documentation is essential for telling the story of the project history and understanding previous work. This also fails to prepare volunteers for their future career in the tech industry which frequently uses flavors of Scrum/Agile.

HfLA teams are required to use GitHub as the documentation method. For now, I've done the best I can to help make the Kanban board understandable and readable. Other parts of the process are talked about in:

• Kanban board - cleanup & protocol recommendations #395

Labels

The labels were poorly named and not described, which lead to misuse and underuse, which then cluttered the dropdown menu. Names were not formatted consistently. There was no findable explanation for distinguishing feature vs p feature. The lack of logic behind label colors led to visual distraction in the Kanban board.

Labels as a GitHub feature are prominently displayed and usable across milestones, boards, and discussions. It is my recommendation that they be used sparingly moving forward.

At the beginning of this project, I assumed that p-feature labels could be replaced with milestones, so I deleted those labels. Now that the project history has been better investigated, and users have gotten used to the new labels, p-feature labels have the potential to be re-added and used properly across multiple milestones.

Milestones

The milestones at the time marked the larger chapters of the project roadmap. However, the roadmap did not describe the milestones in detail. (PM @allthatyazz has since marked the roadmap as depreciated.) These milestones were not projects with an end. The issues therein were better suited to being categorized by label or by project board.

As a result of poorly implemented milestones, the feature has been misunderstood and underused. Instead of using milestones to structure epics, epics were individual cards in the Kanban, with dependencies and children linked as issues with the task checkbox.

More info about the hierarchy in:

• Issue Templates for Figma Kit research #396

Milestones are as close to real epics as Github can get. The milestone page can populate a milestone description, the issues that fall under it, a due date, and a progress bar. The description can also contain links to issues.