I'm currently using Team Services with multiple teams but am having an issue with displaying tasks on the specific team's backlog.
I have created two teams (Portal & Core) with there own area.
I have created a story and have set it to the root area.
To complete this story requires effort by both teams. I have created a task for the Portal team and set it to their area and another task for the Core team and have set it to their area.
If I look at the teams backlog I cannot see the task for them (I have set Show Parents).
Should I be able to split tasks of a story across multiple teams?
Thanks
No, there isn't any way to achieve this directly. But there is an alternative method for this, refer to the steps below for details:
Go to the "Work\Area" settings of the root project and add a new child area for example "TwoTeams".
Go to the "Work\Area" settings of the child projects(Portal & Core) and add "CrossTeam\TwoTeams" area to them.
Assign the user story to "CrossTeam\TwoTeams" area.
Now you will see the User Story and Tasks on the teams backlog like following:
Whether you should be able to is one thing, which is a broader topic. Whether you can is a different question, one with an exact, factual answer: You can't.
A user story is intended to be a discrete unit of work that is completed by a single cross-functional team. If you have multiple teams working on one user story, chances are good that the user story is too large and should be decomposed further.
Related
Our team is having difficulties identifying tasks in a sprint that are open for work. We use Azure DevOps and assign our stories and tasks to a sprint iteration. Our team workflow is modeled after the DevOps Scrum template. All tasks are child work items of stories. Additionally, we set Successor and Predecessor relationships between tasks. We also set Successor and Predecessor relationships between stories. We typically break stories down into tasks small enough so we can swarm a story and get it done quicker. Identifying concurrent work is crucial for our team.
Typical Azure DevOps Sprint Taskboard
The sprint taskboard looks like a complete mess. Each story is a blob of tasks. Developers and testers have difficulty going to the sprint taskboard to find the next open task, because they need to view each task under each story to ensure the predecessors for a task are closed. I'm not sure how to interpret the taskboard view to get this same information.
Typical Work Item Relationships
Azure DevOps allows you to visualize a work item to show its immediate work item relationships. This does not provide enough context when stories have numerous tasks and the relationships between tasks are deep. Each task work item is a child of a story in addition to the predecessor/successor relationships between tasks. On top of that, we order tasks under stories as well.
To be honest, I frequently resort to creating flowcharts just like the one above. It gives a clear visual representation of an entire story from start to finish. You can clearly see areas in the workflow where we can assign work to multiple developers or testers. I just can't shake the feeling I'm missing something in DevOps...
Question:
Is there an automatic order to tasks in the Azure DevOps taskboard view that communicates the predecessor/successor relationships between tasks under a story, beyond the explicit ordering of tasks in the sprint?
Epilogue: I understand that this question will receive comments that we should break stories into smaller pieces, or that one developer should work on a story and we should plan stories that we can work on concurrently. I tried this approach with our team for years, and this is the most efficient way for us to complete work. I fought this hard for a long time, but the fact is the team does extremely well with this breakdown of work — except with identifying the next thing to work on.
The answer to your question is simply "No". You can however write a query and sort the tasks by Priority.
I'm fairly new to the different work items available in Azure Devops Server 2020 (TFS) and wonder if I could get some advice on what to select.
I am the only developer in a project and have direct contact with the stakeholder. When the stakeholder report an issue should I then create an Issue/impediment that describes whats is wrong or needs to be changed. And then create a task or bug that I link to that issue/impediment?
You can use Agile Glossary to get some information.
Issues/Impediments:
A type of work item that helps track unplanned activities. Resolving
an issue or impediment requires more work beyond what was scheduled
based on actual requirements.
Bugs:
A type of work item that records a potential source of dissatisfaction
with the product.
You can use Bugs to report issues from your stakeholders and here you also use two ways:
Use bugs on the requirements level and create tasks under it.
Use bugs on tasks level and link them to affected user story or product backlog item.
Show bugs on backlogs and boards
Or you can use user stories/product backlog items as a record to enhance your product.
I'd like to avoid for the stakeholders to view the name of developers working on tasks (Assigned To columns).
Is there a way to hide it?
Unfortunately, there isn't a permission model for fields in a Process Template, so it isn't possible to hide the field only for certain users.
There are a few places in the user-interface where you can customize the view. For example, you can customize the settings for the Kanban Board to pick and choose which fields are displayed:
And while you can remove Columns from lists, this is only a band-aid workaround as the information is still available and columns can easily be added back in for personal views.
In an agile world, we want our stakeholders to have visibility. Microsoft's view of DevOps is "people and process working with tools to deliver value to customers". Stakeholders have a role in your project, but their contributions aren't the same as those that are doing the work. The classic example is Ham and Eggs
If your concerns are truly about privacy - don't give Stakeholders access! Consider finding an alternate method of keeping them in the loop. For example, Azure DevOps allows you to query their system via an Excel Plugin.
In Microsoft's VSTS, is there a way to have User Story as a child of Epic in the Agile process template, eg including when performing "mapping", without creating a VSTS custom process template? In the image below in the main content area, hide / remove Feature, and in the "Mapping" panel on the right, have Epics for mapping User Stories.
I'm asking because in my org's agile practice we have epics and user stories but we don't see the need / benefit to the extra layer of Feature WIT.
OOTB Agile process template has Epic > Feature > User Story and when you view Product Backlog (aka user stories) you can map them to Features and when you view Feature portfolio backlog you can map them to Epics, but you can't (that I know of) turn off the Feature WIT so that User Stories can be mapped directly to Epics in the GUI.
Btw, it isn't possible to rename OOTB WITs otherwise I would simply turn off Epic WIT and rename it to "Epic OOTB", and rename Feature WIT to "Epic My Org".
UPDATE: Per Add a portfolio backlog level it is possible to add a portfolio backlog level with a new WIT:
You'll first export your process, add or update definition files, and
then import that process to either update existing team projects or
use it to create a team project.
but I want to remove one. I may try the reverse using this procedure but first I'd like some reassurance that it likely works for removing an OOTB level.
Some of the docs I've consulted include:
Agile process work item types and workflow - Microsoft Docs
Define features and epics - Microsoft Docs
There isn’t such feature in VSTS, also you can’t custom too: Modify the backlog and boards
Why don't you use tools like Jira or Rally to map in your agile practices? It will be immensely beneficial in long run.
Agile, by its very definition, means that you should be flexible. As such, ignoring the User Story as a sub-class of feature can be done. However, I think that if the focus of your delivery has a strong user-component to it, then marrying that up in deliverables will give a better indicator to your product owners.
If you're scrumming it, then you'd generally be working on a feature-task loop anyway, so I wouldn't worry, VSTS seems to cope well with both.
VSTS doesn't really concentrate heavy on Workflows OOTB like JIRA pushes (I've seen some crazy JIRA workflows in my time), although it is quite extensible, I believe the VSTS Team have gone Zen Agile in terms of offering a service that helps teams develop code first and foremost, and consigns the machinations of the upper tier management of software delivery and work tracking second.
See the process guidelines for more info: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/boards/work-items/guidance/choose-process?view=vsts
I think this question belongs here (but it is may get voted down). My company is migrating from GitHub to Phabricator. But, not sure how to implement the "boards" feature. I've never worked on a team that used kanban. We have created 8 different "projects" in Phabricator, but we are too small to have separate teams for each project. There are 4 columns for each board:
backlog
selected
in progress
done
How do people get 1 board for doing planning across projects. The only thing I can think of is to create a "master" project that every task gets added to in addition to it's "real" project. For example, an task might be:
Allow support user to resent password reset email
And it would get tagged with the projects "master" and "support_app".
Is there a better way of doing this?
You can plan an release and add milestones for product level and add multiple projects in it and spread it across team members in multiple projects in further small tasks.
Then you will have an individual task board for each team on team level tasks.
A team member then exist across multiple projects and you can also view , how an person is loaded across multiple projects.
If you want to look at bigger picture then you can see the milestones/release level status.