I have been working with my team in a very task-driven process. We have a pool of tasks assigned to a "release" (A Task with all tasks needed to be completed for the next publish linked to it). Some of these tasks are assigned to a specific developer, whilst others are assigned to "Any Developer". My team goes in and works on his/her tasks and then picks up any of the "Any Developer" tasks and assigns them to themselves.
Each task is set to "Ready For Test" when complete and another developer will work on it and, if successful, they set it to "Queued For Release". This gives us a full list of tasks which are included in the publish. Great for testing, checking progress, writing change logs, etc.
This method works really well because it has such a low management and developer overhead, but it has the problem that bugs are not visible to anyone and that the management team cannot easily see where the latest release is - it's all handled in TFS.
This isn't massively different to the Scrumm template - where my "release" is a "sprint", which has a taskboard for the current sprint listing all of the tasks to be completed.
I have two problems with this...
1) Every task needs a Product Backlog Item. I can see some instances where a PBI and multiple tasks are required (Particularly when developing something new) but the number of 1 to 1 PBI's to tasks would be such a high percentage (Particularly when updating/fixing/upgrading existing functionality). This means duplicating every task (with a PBI) and updating task (+PBI) statuses twice
2) Bugs are essentially PBIs. Meaning you need to create a bug and create a task for every bug. Again, duplicating the overhead of "jobs".
I don't want an overhead for my team. I want to be able to give a well organised list of jobs to my developers and have them work through it quickly.
So what I've been doing is playing with the process so that Bugs are considered tasks and appear on the taskboard. The taskboard looks just how I'd like it and we know how many bugs were generated during development.
The problem is... I can't link a bug to a task to show where the bug came from because the taskboard will only show the last bug/task of the Parent > Child chain! So frustrating to have removed the overhead of 1 to 1 PBI > Tasks and Bugs > Tasks and then find that the taskboard no longer works for me. The taskboard was the big hope for giving management a quick view of where we're up to and how much work is left.
Here are my questions:
- Is there any way to show ALL tasks/bugs in a sprint and not just the task at the bottom of a parent > child hierarchy? Are there any plans to change this? I don't see the advantage of this at all!
- Does anyone else have a similar task-driven process and how have they managed things through the Scrumm/Agile templates.
I realise that some people will say that "You're doing it wrong" with the whole Agile approach, but what I'm looking for is a fast approach to managing a development team and jobs which need to be done with as few overheads as possible. Nobody likes an overhead and agile (to me) seems like it has quite a few!