Many roadmap items expand to show a number of steps, e.g. the Reclaimer at 38 out of 57 steps. What kinds of things constitute those steps, and why do we show them as steps rather than a full list?
TL;DRThe roadmap's step counts are tasks within an epic (a group of features and user stories), kept as the vague term "tasks" for simplicity and not covering polish or bug fixing; the Reclaimer still has animation and other pieces left.
So here's just the way that it's structured. I'll explain these terms a little bit, but I don't want to get too far in the weeds. I'll use a little bit of jargon here, but not too much. But anybody who's worked in Scrum will get this right away. So if you see something on there, like the service beacon, right? That's what's known as an epic, which essentially is a group of features, or a group of user stories, a group of things that come together as a nice feature that can come out together and be something that's well-rounded. So whenever you take a look at that and you see one of the cards there, or you see one of the features with that number on it, you're actually looking at an epic. So within that, we've got that number where it says a certain number of tasks completed. So we use tasks because it's something everybody knows. If we were to put on there nine out of 12 user stories completed, it'd be like, well, what's a user story? And then we have to get into a whole conversation about why we use user stories for features where we might not use them for something else. But essentially, everyone gets a task. It's something you've got to do. Basically, if you see that number, 38 out of 57 things done, that's also not going to be all the polishing and necessarily all the things that will come up, and bug fixing, because we can't always predict the future. But we do know on something that we've got a lot of work to do, and we just kind of bundle them under tasks. But those are epics, and there's user stories under there, and there's tasks under there. So that's exactly what's driving it. But that's kind of why it's left a little bit vague. Some people would get it if we put user stories, but it might be a little hard to explain to everybody.
I think on the Reclaimer specifically, again, not going into the weeds, but there's some animation stuff left and there's a couple more pieces left. It's a pretty big ship with a lot of moving parts. So that, besides going into the polish phase that we'll be getting to shortly.