Bucket for Standalone Housekeeping Items

[ata-nas]

To Discuss

• Create a "bucket" (most likely in the form of an epic or similar) to be able to follow housekeeping items that appear during development, but are not directly related to the scope of the PR of the feat/epic the housekeeping item is found in.

Reason

• Housekeeping items inevitably come up, sometimes they are directly related to the feat/epic we are working under and can be followed up there, but sometimes they are completely unrelated. Such items must be transformed into something actionable (most likely chores), but then they have no place where they can be easily discovered in the future, since they are not related to the scope of the feat/epic they are found in.

Discussion

This discussion is a follow up of this comment and a team parking lot discussion which perfectly showcases the reason behind the proposal. During the development of the async writers, a housekeeping item is noticed that should be acted upon in the future, but is in no way related to the persistence epic. It cannot be put inside the persistence epic and followed there. If a housekeeping item is found during development and is directly related to the scope of the epic it is found in, then by all means, this housekeeping item can and should become a chore that will be followed by the related epic. But when something unrelated is found, as is the example above, we have no way of following these items.

The proposal is to make some "bucket", maybe an epic or uber epic that has the purpose to store such housekeeping items so they can be easily discovered in the future, either worked on standalone, or if they happen to fit well with the scope of some other current item, they can be included to be resolved there.

A consideration to be made is, these should be time bound as @jsync-swirlds suggested. Maybe quarterly or some other measure.

So the question is does the team like the idea? Any further suggestions? Also, if we agree to proceed with it, under what form shall this be followed (maybe this is most important for @Nana-EC)

@mattp-swirldslabs @georgi-l95 @Nana-EC @AlfredoG87 @jsync-swirlds Thoughts?

[mattp-swirldslabs]

I like the idea of a top-level bucket to track loose tasks as we talked about

[jsync-swirlds]

I like this idea in general.
The following might offer some small improvement:

• These should be relatively small tech-debt type chores only
  • Larger changes should be in their own stories and epics and separately prioritized.
• The value of a time bound is completion.
  • Assume the following characteristics
    • Time-bound the epics to one quarter each
    • Add chores to the current quarterly epic
    • Complete chores from the previous quarterly epic if any before acting on the current quarter chores
    • The team commits that the previous quarter's chores will all be done by the end of the following quarter (many current quarter chores might be done, but that's not guaranteed)
  • With the above these small tasks might be done very quickly, but in the worst case will never linger more than 2 quarters.
  • The same works at a monthly cadence, with the caveat that there will be more of these epics created.

[ata-nas]

As a result of this proposal, we have #595 and #596. Closing this discussion as successfully resolved.