Engineering Work Prioritization

Purpose: This document contains relevant information related to best practices on how engineers should prioritize work during the different moments of releases & sprints.

I.Regular Days: Weekly engineers are expected to check squad backlog and share what their are planning to achieve based on backlog assigned priorities or squad channel mentioned pressing items. From there, engineers are expected to work on clearing project scope, building ADRs, building the needed pull requests, and reviewing other engineers work as applicable.

Focus should always be in this order: Changes requested > Waiting review > To Do. Inside these 3 steps, we should also always follow the task priority (as pointed on Jira fields). There is no exact "do this all the time" rule but these should guide you most of the time.

II.Freeze Period for a given release: Wider engineering period, between release candidate first cut until actual release of Rocket.Chat latest major or minor release.

During freeze Period:

Focus should still follow the same principle, but now for only Milestone marked tasks. Once all milestone marked tasks are done, and no regressions are left, we resume "regular sprint day work". In case an item is not expected for a given release that had already been though initial candidate cut, just follow regular days instructions from session I.

III. Important remarks regardless of period:

1.Remember that tasks assigned to you are your responsibility and require your attention to keep moving ahead on the cycle. The PM/Manager/Lead will help with this up to a certain point and guide which should be the priorities, but this "help" should be minimal from their side.

2.If your task has a problem which you don't know how to solve, needs PM/Lead advice, is blocked for any reason, you should be contacting someone to unlock this task as earlier as you can.