Fission is roadmapping in public with Starmap, a tool for cross-team planning.

What is Starmap?

Starmap is an adaptive and flexible tool developed by Protocol Labs that renders GitHub issues as a roadmap. It removes the need to make duplicate tasks in a Gantt chart or Excel spreadsheet to track progress.

Starmap was created with the needs of the Protocol Labs Network in mind. The PLN contains hundreds of companies of varying sizes and project types, and roadmaps can take many forms. Instead of creating a one-size-fits-all tool, the developers intentionally made it adaptable using containers.

You can create any number of containers you want to fit your specific needs. If you want to work in Epics and user stories, you can. If you’re only using Low-level GitHub issues? No problem. Milestones and low-level issues? Got you covered. All you need to do is create a GitHub issue to use as a container, name it the way you want, and add child issues and an ETA. You’re all set!

How to Build a Starmap

As shown in the following screenshots, the project architecture at Fission is the following from top to bottom:

  • Project issue
  • Milestones
  • Low-level issues, which are the actual tasks that need to be completed

If you don’t have a roadmap yet, the easiest way to start is by reviewing your spec.

Identify the features or improvements you'll need to make to ship your MVP or upgrade, and set clear milestones. Then identify the tasks that need to be checked off to hit those milestones.

During this process, it's important to consider your internal and external dependencies. Do you need to wait for a specific tech update to be released to be able to progress on your milestone? Which of your task needs to be done before the other?

Estimate your issues, prioritize them, and add the GitHub issue's URL in the body of their respective milestone issue. Add each milestone issue URL in the body of the project issue.

Finally, paste the project issue (or root node) URL into Starmap, which will render for you immediately.

Collaboration is Key

At Fission, the process of roadmapping is collaborative and user-driven. Fission's Project Manager, Bastien Dehaynin, knows he cannot build a Starmap alone - he needs to work with the project developers who completely understand the tech.

Together Bastien and the developers create user stories.  They describe the features from the user's perspective and clearly share their needs and expectations, as well as why those features are important to them in the first place.  

Then they break the user stories themselves down into small chunks of work that a single developer can feasibly complete (the low-level GitHub issues). The tasks are then prioritized and organized into milestones. Together they estimate how long each milestone will take to complete and distribute them over a timeline. Then Bastien translates all of this into GitHub and a Starmap.

To Infinity and Beyond

Fission currently has Starmaps for WNFS, Go CAR Mirror, and IPVM. We are in the process of adding the Fission Server Rust rewrite project and RhizomeDB as well.

Fission is also spearheading an effort to increase Starmap adoption across the PLN. Starmap allows all teams involved in a project to add their issues to the same roadmap. Therefore, the more teams build out Starmaps, the greater our awareness of other projects' needs and how we can work together.

For example, if one team is working on a decentralized app and needs an authorization solution, they might look at the roadmaps of other projects and see that they've used UCANs. Or if one project is working on one half of a problem and another is working on the other, they can team up and ship protocols and an MVP.

It's also easier to recognize potential bumps in the road and mitigate them. For example, if one of your roadmapped dependencies depends on another tool that is not being actively maintained, that might be something to watch.

If we all work together, we have the ability to work together to surface hidden needs and opportunities so we can all reach our goals faster.

Here's a Starmap demo led by Bastien.

And here is the IPFS Thing 2023 Starmap demo.

Want to learn how you can get started with Starmap? Visit the documentation site or reach out to Bastien on Fission's Discord. He's happy to work with you!