Purpose

This page contains general information about the Experiment Control Systems group work for MEC.

How to write a better (more focused Jira ticket)

Priority definitions (from Jira Ticket Submission How-To):

  • Trivial: A problem/feature with little or no impact on operations. E.g. small typos on screens, etc.
  • Minor: A low priority feature or fix, or a long-term request made as part of operations planning. 
  • Major: A medium priority feature or fix, or a medium-term request made as part of operations planning. 
  • Critical: A high priority feature or fix that will drastically improve operations. May or may not need immediate attention. 
  • Blocker: An experiment-breaking problem or missing feature. Requires immediate attention.

Types

ECS at MEC uses the following values for the Type field:

  • Bug - It's broken
  • New Feature - Improvements
  • Story - This is typically used for tickets that cover diverse tasks and usually the umbrella ticket for a specific experiment, for example "L-10034 [Gregori] support".
  • Task - Work on existing system

We have not been making use of the Story and Epic types to date although as noted above we will start using Story as appropriate. Tickets of type Task can cover everything from < 1 person-day work to long-term projects. 

Labels

For the New Feature, Task, and Story types, we use the Labels field to help classify the activity:

  • analysis - related to scientific data reduction/analysis
  • data - related to the data acquisition system (DAQ)
  • experiment_support - related to a specific experiment
  • operations - related to general improvement, not specific to an experiment
  • project - related to a long-term project, e.g. the Thomson Parabola

There can be other labels defined by ECS management, for example power-outage-20240302.

Multiple labels can be used on a ticket. For example work on pyFAI for use by Gregori and McBride can be labeled analysis and experiment_support.

Example experiment support Story description

This experiment support ticket is classed as a Story.

As the ECS Delivery POC for MEC I want all required systems and devices for L-10034 to be ready for science operations on schedule. This requires coordination between all of the teams that support MEC. 

This ticket will contain the following:

  • Link to the questionnaire
  • Link to the project schedule
  • Sub tasks for specific activities, for example: tech support, stage installation and checkout, detector installation and checkout. 

Details of progress and any issues encountered with be logged as comments in the relevant sub tasks. Important progress and scheduling information will be summarized here.


  • No labels