Summary
Approving this proposal is would signal a continuation of budget funding for another 6 month term, August 1st 2024 - January 31st, 2025 (Seventh consecutive term) for the current Operations Workstream that was established and renewed with passing of the previous proposals: [SCP-8], [SCP-59], [SCP-94], [SCP-125], [SCP-147], and [SCP- 165].
This proposal seeks to renew the Operations workstream with its current contributors, KPIs, and goals. The Operations workstream is always open and flexible to collaborative updates to future responsibilities, processes, and success metrics to continue to support the DAO as we continue to constantly evolve.
This proposal adopts [SCP-92] Definition of Workstream Leader
Abstract
The Operations workstream is an integral part of the growth and development of healthy systems for reliably producing and maintaining the ShapeShift product suite and its uptime, responsiveness and feature functionality. The Operations Workstream provides front line assistance and monitoring of the products produced by the DAO in both customer support and feature testing throughout the release process. The workstream additionally provides similar support and structure to the DAO, its ecosystem, networks, and meeting structure.
Through Production Issue Procedure Best Practices, Triage Management, Deployment and Regression Testing, Customer Support and DAO Admin Procedures and Practices, the ShapeShift DAO Operations Workstream provides essential resources and tools for efficiency, organization, and overall product and services health that are vital to the success of the DAO, the product suite, it’s contributors, and $FOX token utility.
Motivation
Renewing this workstream will allow Operations to continue to work side by side with other workstreams to increase efficiency in individual procedural processes across the DAO and help progress deployment and testing processes while still verifying and maintaining reliability, health, and full functionality of all outlined responsibilities and services.
Areas of focus and Operations responsibilities maintained by the workstream also include: Hosting the Weekly Governance call and advocating the Governance process, Organizing and hosting the quarterly AllFox community call, Marketing support and release communication, Leading and collaborating in Product specs, Weekly Release Thread updates in the forum, Expected Feature Release Testing guidelines, Go/No Gos, Retros and other coordinated meetings or DAO processes, RDP management, Gitbook documentation management,and full coverage of customer support.
The Operations workstream continues to focus on the wider picture of the product suite’s uptime, functionality, and overall health and user support. It additionally mirrors that responsibility in the DAO Discord, Github, and Notion by synergizing and coordinating cross-stream collaboration further strengthening the DAO.
This six month period will have an additional focus on building out resources and KPIs focused around error monitoring in mixpanel and functionality monitoring such as refunded trades in decentralized public resources.
Specification
The Operations workstream Notion repo can be found here.
Operations maintains:
Triage: Known Issues
2024 Prod Issues tracking, Release Stats and testing fees,
Ops Sprint, Governance Call, AllFox, Go/NoGos, Retros, RDP program, Gitbook, Customer support (via Chatwoot).
The Operations Workstream strives to keep the greater DAO agile and committed to maximizing efficiency, scalability, and transparency with a strategic lean into data-based decision making. At times, best practices and procedures may be challenged, modified, updated, changed, archived or revisited to maintain those objectives. (See: The Bounty Process, Trusted Community Devs, Triage Report Tracker, Unsolved User Problems, the governance tracker, POAP minting, daily regression testing, the evolution of goat/no goats, etc)
The renewal term length for this workstream and its contributors is 6 months, from August 1st, 2024 through January 31st, 2025.
This proposal continues @Tyler | ShapeShift as the Workstream leader and @MBMaria as Operations Coordinator.
@reed.thorfox has been contracted with the Workstream for hourly part time contributions as an Operations Assistant, his contributions are paid in FOX from the Operations Workstream’s saved FOX in Colony from previous terms. The compensation for this contributor is not considered in this budget in this proposal.
Budget ask: $168,000 over 6 months to be sent monthly in Colony in USDC and FOX
Monthly total budget: $28,000
Monthly USDC: $19,625.20 (70%)
Monthly FOX: $8,374.80 (30%)
6 month USDC budget: $117,751.20
6 month FOX budget: $50,248.80
6 month Total budget: $168,000
There are only two changes in this proposal from the previous proposal and both are budget line items:
- SCP 173 - ‘Updating and renewing the We FOXed up campaign for Support’ passed on March 28th, 2024, in between renewals, and is now considered part of the Monthly FOX in the Operations Workstream Budget.
This previously passed proposal accounts for 57% of the FOX increase in ask from the previous proposal and 25% of the total increase in ask from the previous proposal.
- There is now a budget line item in contributor salaries for a ‘potential new hire.’ The compensation for this role is set at $4500/month with 25% of it in FOX. This role would allow flexibility for an additional Operations Assistant to join the team in release testing, support communication, and would allow broader coverage for the team to support expedited response times and greater ability for the team to handle vacation/sick time off.
This role is not guaranteed to be filled, the additional budget will only be requested in Colony upon it being filled.
If the role from 2 is not filled, there are no budget increases in this proposal that were not already approved by Governance.
Operations would account for ~9.9% of the total DAO monthly stable spend if this proposal were to be passed:
Current monthly USDC spend: $182,525
Marketing renewal USDC increase: $1100
Operations renewal USDC increase: $3,375
Operations New monthly USDC spend: $19,625.20
New monthly DAO USDC spend $196,900 (If Operations and Marketing Renewals pass)
There are no salary increases or bonuses to compensation added to this renewal to continue to keep a conscious effort in minimizing Operations’ footprint on the monthly spend and its impact on the runway.
If network conditions or the price of FOX decreasing dramatically alters or changes Operations ability to perform required deployment and regression testing, an additional proposal addendum for test funds may be proposed.
Operations will continue to be mindful and agile about its processes with the DAO to continue to provide proficient coverage and support in all of the outlined areas of this proposal while continuing to maintain our KPIs under this optimized budget.
Specific Goals and Success Metrics
The goals and success metrics for the Operations Workstream are listed below, split into current Goals and KPIs.
Current Measurables:
Production Issue Best Practices
Goals:
To minimize downtime of the entire product suite.
To resolve production environment bugs efficiently with minimal disruption to engineering processes, deployment cadences, or user experience.
KPIs:
99% uptime of the product suite and services:
February: 100%
March 97.6%
April: 100%
May: 100%
June: 99.9%
July: 100% (so far)
Average 6 month uptime: 99.58% (99.81% last term)
<8 Production Issue Escalations per Quarter - 4 escalations in the last 3 quarters: 0 Escalations in Q4, 3 Escalations in Q1, 1 in Q2.
<50 Total Combined DAO Contributor hours dedicated to Production Issue Resolutions Per Quarter: 26 hours dedicated.
Triage Management
Goals:
To discover, isolate, navigate, and manage resolutions of user facing issues in all ShapeShift products and services.
To provide known troubleshooting and mitigation steps for issue reporters and users during the discovery and recreation of triage tickets.
To mitigate and expedite time required from core contributors spent on bug tickets, issue reports, and production level emergencies.
To transfer correctly completed and accurate Github tickets of triage bugs to Engineering or Product to be posted for bounty.
KPIs:
Greater than 80% resolution rate goal: 96.8% Resolution rate this term, 75.3% Resolution rate last term, 71% resolution rate previous term.
This goal was finally hit this term. Operations succeeded in improving our overall resolution rate term over term with improvements and optimizations to the Triage process and ticket review/clean up practices as a new focus the previous term.
Deployment and Regression Testing
Goals:
To catch 95% of prod issues during the deployment testing process.
To catch user facing issues in production environments in regression tests and #triage them accordingly.
A deployment test is completed by the Operations Workstream during each release process and upon request in pre-deployment branch testing.
Specific regression tests are performed once a week by an Operations Workstream contributor to complete a full monthly regression testing schedule in accordance with regression testing best practices.
Operations prioritize blocking bugs, supporting engineers, and efficiency in the processes already in place over chasing non-blocking bugs for a ‘perfected’ release.
In the 108 releases deployed since Feb 1, 2024, 2 total prod issues were experienced. Production issue bugs in 108 releases = 98.15%
KPIs:
<2 Cadences missed per quarter due to bugs overlooked in Ops Testing (0 cadence missed last term)
<2 Rollbacks during releases per quarter due to bugs overlooked in Ops Testing (7 Rollbacks occurred last term)
DAO Admin Procedures and Practices
Goals:
To organize successful DAO meetings related to Goat/No Goat, Retros, Ops Sprints, and AllFoxes.
To track, organize, record, and optimize DAO repos keeping them current and relevant. To help in cross workstream collaboration projects that optimize efficiency and collaborative, transparent communication.
To provide assistance in projects that require support in generating procedures to be completed for the DAO or other workstreams.
KPIs:
Keep All Workstream leaders and key contributors informed and involved in contributions to all Ops Sprints, Governance Calls, AllFoxes Slide decks, Go/No Gos, and Retros.
Benefits:
If this proposal passes, the DAO will continue to fund the Operations workstream budget to meet the deliverables and services outlined which are integral to the DAO’s success and current practices. Coverage for Prod Issue escalations, Triage Management, Regularly scheduled regression and deployment testing, Customer Support, Cross workstream alignment and stakeholder resources would all be focused, maintained and improved upon by the workstream.
Passing this proposal will continue uninterrupted support and services offered from the Operations workstream to the DAO.
Drawbacks:
Funding this workstream costs the DAO stablecoins and FOX during the duration of the proposed term. This workstream would cost the DAO treasury potentially $168,000 over 6 months ($28,000/month) if all funds are needed and exhausted in the budget costing the DAO $ from the stablecoin runway.