I'm curious with usage of DevOps boards/sprints/kanban, what is the industry standard for handling usage by multiple stakeholders?
More specifically, DevOps comes with standard states like "Active/Resolved/etc", but what if we want to capture more, such as "Deployed to env X", or even testing statuses. I know we can add additional statuses, but is that the right thing to do?
The challenge we have, is if the Kanban is used, then all those statuses must be represented on the Kanban, because movement on that board actually sets the status, so if we remove a status column from the Kanban, any WI with that status would effectively be hidden.
So effectively, I've added a bunch of statuses to cater for environments, testing, different reasons for on-hold, etc, but its being argued that this makes the Kanban too complex to get an easy snapshot of whats happening.
It's been suggested that we remove all these statuses, and instead use Tags and Swimlanes, which seems much less robust to me, it accomplishes the same thing, but without a single source of truth like the status provides.
Just curious if anyone with more experience with DevOps can shed light on how they've tackled this.
It looks that you want to get feature which is not implemented - Allow multiple states in the KanBan Board Columns
Actually the TFS allows only one state for every column in the KanBan Board which makes the whole developing process messy. We had to create several columns for all the states that our dev team has. It would be great if TFS could allow to assign multiple states to the columns, and doing and done columns to reduce the number of columns in the whole process.
There is no way to overcome this and what you need.
You can create custom field with pick list and then configure Kanban to display this field on the board:
This maybe helps you a bit.
Related
We're using Azure Devops Boards as our primary work tracking environment. For our agile planning process, we've got a backlog full of user stories for which we use tags to categorize PBIs. For instance, when a story is ready for refinement by the team, it's tagged with Refinement. As soon as refinement is done it's tagged with Ready to indicate we're going to take it up for sprint planning. Nothing out of the ordinary I'd say.
Now I was looking for a way to historically chart the count of user stories having these tags, but I can't seem to find a widget supporting that. The time-tracking widgets don't seem to take tags into account and with the query-type widgets you can search for tags but you get the current set of items, not the option to plot it historically.
Does anyone know whether this can be done in one way or the other?
Some fields have a was ever such as State. Tags don't appear to support a was ever operator though, so you may have to use the REST API to search the audit data. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/devops/audit/?view=azure-devops-rest-6.0
Our company has recently introduced Azure DevOps to streamline project management process. Currently, 140 projects are created under our organization in Azure DevOps. As and when requirement comes from client for any specific project, we create tasks/bugs for different developers under that project. Currently we use only two Work Item type - Bug and Task.
Now the issue is Management of the company wants to see Project-wise number of "New/Open", "Active" and "Closed" Tasks and Bugs in a SINGLE chart. That means, that single chart must fit consolidated data of 140 projects. If a person views that single chart they must get idea, for example that - Project 1 has 2 new/open work items, 2 active work items and 2 closed Work items , Project 2 has 1 new/open work items, 10 active work items and 3 closed Work items and so on.. This is done so that management in a glance can understand which project is lagging behind for customer delivery. So that they can work accordingly build more manpower for those Projects.
I have tried to create various such charts and widgets with different queries in Azure DevOps. I used widget burn up and burn out charts but it gives data for tasks of single Project only. Also when we add multiple projects to it, it shows summation of completed/remaining tasks for those Projects & NOT Project name-wise completed/remaining tasks bifurcation.
I also tried "Charts for work item" widget but it also fetches count as per- Assignee, State and Work Item type and not project name wise count is fetched.
I don't want to navigate through 140 projects pages to see it's open, active and closed tasks. So please help me out in suggesting the ideas on How can I build a single chart from where we can get all this data? I will be forever grateful for your answers.
Thank you!
You could create a query across projects, select Team Project column in Column option, ad save the query as shared query. Check the screenshots below:
Then add a chart widget to a dashboard, select Pivot table, and set Team Projects, State as Rows and Columns. Check the screenshot below:
You could expand the view to see more details:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/report/dashboards/charts?view=azure-devops#add-a-chart-widget-to-a-dashboard
I'd be slightly careful based on what you've put down because I don't think your management team quite understand what they need, and DevOps can only do so much. I'd be challenging them around the setup of your DevOps process personally because I don't think it's advisable to not have user stories as part of your setup. Although it simplifies some aspects of DevOps, our experience has been that people have been able to group things together better with user stories as well as tasks.
Appreciate it's a good idea to be able to see what's going on across all projects, but I think there are probably further criteria to think about. E.g. do you want to see estimates instead of/as well as the count of the items since that will have a better reflection of the effort required. In terms of completed items and in fact, probably all that you're displaying, again it's more on your project process, but are management genuinely interested in everything? For example, do they need to know that something was closed 6 months ago, or are they just interested in the last month?
I suppose what I'm getting at is you probably need a bit more information from management about what they want to use the report for so you can give them what they need rather than they want. There's a temptation to say you want everything because you don't understand the capabilities of the solution or what you're going to use it for, and my recommendation would be to challenge them on this so you can better present things (giving them what they need rather than what they want).
In terms of what you're looking to do, I'll openly admit I'm not clued up on everything DevOps related but I doubt you'll be able to report at a project level within DevOps. I think what you'd need to do is set up your query, which would look across all projects in your organisation, and then export the results to Excel. From there I'd create a pivot table (or perhaps more than 1) with the data that you need. Have Project names down the left side (row headers), and bring in whatever else you need as columns. I think that's probably a good quick win to get something in front of your management team, and then you could challenge from there - almost picking holes in it so that they realise that the business decisions that they'd make from this may not be fully informed, and suggesting some changes. From experience, it's probably better to consider it almost as a prototype and not get bogged down with a solution at this stage because you may be asked for changes when they can visualise what they've originally asked for. Once management is happy you could look at other solutions to provide the report, but Excel is typically a good starting point I've found in the past when working on something new like this.
Will be setting up first VSTS team project and picking the process template, it seems to be down to either agile or scrum. Reading other posts, it seems scrum is the simpler and for the most part it makes sense for our small team. However, I do not think we want to use sprints and the "sizing" method for kanban typically uses is more loose also. My question is if I choose the scrum template, am I forced to use the sprints and if not, can I remove them?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/work/work-items/guidance/choose-process?view=vsts
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/work/kanban/kanban-basics?view=vsts
The concept of "Iterations" is a fundamental part of the work item tracking experience and you cannot change that.
However, there's nothing stopping you from setting up a completely flat iteration structure consisting of only a Backlog iteration with no defined start or end dates, then managing everything from the backlog view in a Kanban fashion.
There is no difference between any of the process templates in this regard, only in the work item names and in some rules around state transitions. I believe Agile has looser rules for state transition, whereas Scrum has stricter rules.
Background:
JIRA offers a single set of statuses for all types of issues in a project.
Problem:
The problem is that the status set for a task is ToDo, InProgress, and Done. While for a UserStory in the same project it might be Designing, Developping, Testing, Releasing, and Done. It can even be different for a bug or an Epic.
Question:
How do you keep track of the workflow of your product and at the same time manage the status of your tasks using the single set of JIRA status.
PS: I know they can be customized for each project, but it doesn't help because you can't customize them for each issue type separately.
I think one of the reasons that JIRA offers the To Do, In Progress, and Done is that these can apply to anything. You either haven't done it, you're doing something, or you finished. That set can apply to any type of item.
That being said, I feel your pain in wanting to have a better view into the true state of an issue. What we have found we use for our OnDemand agile boards is to set up something like the following:
To Do
In Progress
Ready for Review
In Review
Done
For most types of issues, this can work. It adds that bit of extra layer to be able to identify what is ready for testing.
One of the things that is tricky is dependent tasks. For example, I noticed you mentioned "Designing" as a stage, and I'm not sure this makes sense in an agile sense. If the design is emerging from the development, it may be better to allow the design/development to flow within the development team. However, we all know that sometimes you need to get some details ironed out before you can proceed, or there may be some people that need to become involved before a dev can proceed. We made the mistake of trying to turn this into a stage, but what we found was that this was really either a sub-task for part of the team, or an impediment (blocker). By flagging stories, you can identify that a story requires something to be done before the development team can proceed.
If you are using Kanban, and not a Scrum board, the sub-task approach will not be for you. In those cases, you'll just need to make sure you have stages that make sense for all the issues you create. Stages will have to be fairly 'generic'. This sounds bad.
But it is not!
I believe teams generally use the stages for a few reasons:
Checking on status of an iteration
Inform other team members that they can pick up an item
Try to get a visual estimate on how close to Done an issue is.
More stages doesn't necessarily give a better status on an iteration as you really just need to see how many points you've closed and how many are in progress. So, at least for that goal, a more generic set of stages should work.
As for informing team members, too often I've seen teams retreat to the digital board to replace communication with each other. The fewer stages you have, the more you can force your team to talk to each other and work together to get a story to done. Things will work better this way, I guarantee it! Having a bit of a break-down helps, especially if you are working on a lot of items at once or have distributed teams working in different time zones, but keeping it simple is usually better.
Tracking the "how close to Done" is the hardest to do with generic stages. However, the multiple stages can be misleading. An item that is almost all the way across might have a severe bug in it that hasn't been found yet, so no matter how many stages you have your view on this item isn't any more accurate than a single "In Progress" stage. It isn't Done until it's Done :)
This was a long way for me to recommend keeping your workflow simple and letting your team use communication to keep on top of things. Maybe I should have just started with that!
The statuses that are available to each project is determined by the Workflow to which it is assigned. Not only does a workflow define the statuses, but it also defines what statuses you can progress to from a particular status. You can either create your own Workflows or you can download predefined workflows that suite your need.
In order to have separate workflows for different issue types, we need to define a Workflow Scheme:
1- Go to Jira Administration -> Workflow Schemes
2- Edit the Wokflow Scheme that is assigned to your project
3- Click the "Add Workflow" to add a new workflow for the issue types for which you need a different workflow and assign those issue types.
How does design fit into the kanban method. Should there be a dedicated column for design to be placed in, or is the high & low level design of the story done before it even moves from the story queue into the WIP?
There is no single answer. It all depends how a team works. What you basically do with Kanban board is you map the way you work into the board. It means the answer to your question is within the process you follow when you build software.
To help you a bit - according to rules you should follow when you work with Kanban:
You should visualize workflow, which means all stages which are somehow separate in real life should be visualized in such way on the board.
Your policies should be explicit, which means everyone in the team should understand the process the same. If a sticky note is in a specific column it should mean that a feature is in such and such state and it should be obvious for everyone in the team.
Additionally, it is a typical situation that separate column is introduced when you deal with handoffs, meaning a feature is handed off from one team member to another, e.g. separate columns for development (done by developer) and testing (done by quality engineer).
When talking about design I've seen different approaches: either a single separate column for whole design, more columns when design is kind of extensive or no dedicated column at all when design is merged/mixed with development. Ask yourself, and your team, how it looks like in your case and you will have the answer how the board should look like.
And one final advice: don't be afraid of experimenting. If you aren't sure how you work, which is possible, try different things and check which board design works best in you case.