Design tooling milestones

[andycochran]

Summary

Proposes updates to the milestone short descriptions to add design tooling.

Changes Proposed

• Adds a milestone for prototyping tools
• Adds a milestone for diagramming and whiteboarding tools
• Adds a milestone for research operations tools

Feedback requested

• Since diagramming tools are likely to see cross-functional use, is there a better section to put this milestone in?

[lucasmbrown-usds]

Overall this looks truly excellent. Great work @andycochran ! And it's very exciting to think about getting all these support tools setup.

My only large piece of feedback is -- do we want to keep this as 3 independent milestones, or do we want to make it one milestone (Design-Tooling) that has 3 tickets underneath it (i.e., an ADR for prototyping, an ADR for diagramming, an ADR for research operations)?

I lean towards the latter to keep the milestones as something high-level. Milestones are basically Epics, and I've seen some people use a rule of thumb of "epics should be roughly, order-of-magnitude like 6 weeks of work", whereas things that can be done in 1-2 weeks are more like individual tickets.

But I'm very persuadable on this point, or whatever conventions we want to settle on.

If we make a combined milestone, we could also consider whether AB-Testing-Plan should be moved under that milestone too.

[widal001]

Great work on flagging these important decisions that aren't currently represented in the list of milestones!! It's exciting to see the list grow!

Considerations/Suggestions

• Echoing @lucasmbrown-usds, I might recommend combining these three sections into a single milestone, but representing them as distinct sections within the Technical Definition section -- similar to what we did with Communications Platforms or Developer Tools.
• If we combine them, it might also recommend adding the combined milestone into the User Research section or the User Interface section -- unless you think there are other design-specific milestones we might create that wouldn't fall under one of those other sections.
• Once we finalize the set of milestones and the section they're being added to, it would be great to also add it to the corresponding section in the milestone dependency diagram
• I imagine we'll tackle this milestone pretty soon, but it would also be great to get your thoughts on whether or not any other milestones in the project are currently blocked by these choices (e.g. Static site launch with NOFO content or Foundational UI) and add this milestone to their list of dependencies and reflect the dependencies in the dependency diagram as well.

Overall, this awesome! Love the options you've suggested and the instinct to make sure that we capture them as formal decisions in this process.

Let me know if you'd like to set up sometime to work through the milestone definition template. I think you've got 80-90% of the key details we'd be adding into that doc, so we might be able to get it drafted and start recording these decisions in the upcoming sprint.

[lucasmbrown-usds]

Looks excellent to me. Very nice work pulling this together, thanks for taking the initiative @andycochran !

[widal001]

Thanks for making these changes @andycochran, looks good to me!