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How to handle Tasks?
How do you guys handle the concept of tasks inside a story in Tracker? We would like tasks to be visible and belonging to story in a tree view.
I’m confused
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Inappropriate?Hi Bruno...instead of stories that decompose into many tasks, we prefer to work with small, granular stories that can be completed in a few days or less. It's possible to maintain a to-do list in the story description field, though.
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Inappropriate?Makes sense, agile methodology talks about going back to the domain honor to iron out the details of a story. Where should I store those? What about the engineering tasks?
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?Hi Bruno...you can use comments as a running discussion with the story owner, as well as the description field and/or file attachments. For engineering work that isn't really part of implementing a particular feature story, you can create chores (another type of story). The most important thing, in my opinion, is to break your features into small, independent stories, that can be implemented relatively quickly, and not worry too much about how the stories break down into coding tasks.
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Inappropriate?In my case, for my current client, User Stories need to be broken down into tasks. Even simple User Stories usually require at least 2 people to complete separate tasks to make it a deployable piece of functionality. I sure wish Pivotal had support for Task Management.
I’m sad a key element is missing
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Inappropriate?I agree that some kind of sub-story task system would be useful.
We're presently using Scrum, which generally advocates using Story Point estimates for stories ahead of a sprint, and then breaking down Stories into individual tasks for the Sprint. At that point, you attach hour-estimates to tasks, and track your burndown against "hours remaining" at the task level.
Pivotal is a little more high-level than that. I agree with Dan that given the way it works, you really need to break your Stories down to be more granular. That is what we are doing.
But we still use the Task lists (and comments), like this:
Tasks:
[JPM] Do the thing with the widget - 4h
[QRS] Test the widget thing - 2h
[PRT] Document the widget thing -1h
If you have multiple people working on a ticket, they have to be aware and collaborate on it. Pivotal doesn't have robust workflow/assignment capabilities, but in a way that is a feature, following the agile mantra. People should be collaborating and discussing the issues offline, and the team needs to manage its ownership of the story. Agile (and Pivotal) shy away from "just do my task and assign it to the next person" mentality.
I think the most important thing is that your team is "self-managing" and owns its stories as a team.
Hope that is useful. -
Inappropriate?Once I am done with a task I want to know which task is next, or when I want to see our team's progress, I want to see where we are.
Because there aren't any lanes (scrumboard) where you can tell visually the ratios between undone, doing, and done work, the only way to get an idea where you are is be clicking around in the dozen or more stories to see if you have any remaining tasks.
Is it too much to ask to add the task name to search to be indexed or allow for tasks to be assigned to people?
I don't need a complicated workflow, but it would make sense to be able to ask "what tasks ro stories do I have undone work in?"
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?@phep - task text is indexed, and there is also the "my work" pane. These make it easier to find in-progress stories which have a given task.
Also, many teams also consider it an anti-pattern to have more than one story per owner started at once. If you cannot continue on a given story, you can label it "blocked", unstart it, then move on to the next story in the backlog.
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