If a story is in progress and then swim lanes are code review and QA-ready, how should the assignment of stories work? Should a story remain assigned to the developer? And should the code review and QA tasks be created as sub-tasks in it? Or should the story be re-assigned when it is moved to code review by the developer, and when code review is done, it is moved to QA lane by the reviewer and re-assigned to QA by the reviewer. It seems anti-pattern to re-assign tickets from in-progress to future states. It looks okay to re-assign tickets before it was brought in the sprint but not after.
Scrum does not have anything to say about how the work is done nor how a board is managed. However, many team's look at Kanban's "pull" approaches to answer this. In that case, work is never assigned or given, it is only claimed/taken on. Therefor, work would be moved to "Code Review" by the reviewer when they began the work. Similarly, the work would be moved to QA by the tester when they started. "Ready" columns are a bit of a misnomer as they are not states. Rather, they are statuses of the previous state. If your order is Code Review - QA Ready - QA, then in fact, QA ready is a possible designation on work in Code Review. This may seem minor, but it is very important to prevent pile-ups in your process where work stalls without owners.
There is no single answer, but one way of doing it is to think of of a User Story as a container of tasks where each task is a small technical deliverable of any kind. With this mindset you can effectivly stop thinking of who the assignee is as each developer will have its small contribution towards the goal.
One of the problems with task re-assignment is that at one point you can loose traceability of who has done what and productivity on per developer basis. So in this sense having each teammember doing its own tasks and delivering towards the completion of a user story can solve this.
Then you can assign the User Story to the product owner, or you can assign it to a developer that kind of holds ownership towards its delivery to test when the tester will take over. But the user story when assigned to a developer does not mean that he owns the User Story, it just means that it is his responsibility to ensure hand over to test nothing more nothing less.
When a tester encounters a bug then you create a bug attached to the User story.
Not recommended. It's feasible tho. You have to assess your current work situation. If the user story is something that can make a whole difference, then it would be better to just stop the sprint, reassess your situation and make the necessary changes - then continue. Either way, when you are adding a new user story to the backlog, deadlines can be hardly met.
We are using a little bit different approach. Like we have following columns on Jira Board.
To-do
In_progress
Ready for Review
Ready for QA
In-Testing
Rework/Rejected
Done
A developer pick a task from to-do and assign it to him self and keep it in-progress. Once he is done he moved it to Ready for Review and keep it un assign. Someone will pick it and assign it to himself and review it. After reviewing that person will move the case to ready for QA without assigning it to anyone. Whoever is free or plaining to work on case will assign that case to himself and when he starts working on the case, he will move it to in-testing. As a result of testing the case can go in rework/rejected or in Done. If it moved to Rework/Rejected he will assign it to original person who initially worked on it. And that person when rework on it, will move the case to in-progress again.
Related
Long story short: we had a team of 3 devs and 1 QA working in a stable rhythm of a two-week sprint of 50 story points. We discussed increasing the team by one dev and 1 QA with the PO. The QA was added to the team, but the developer will not be added anymore due to various reasons.
Now, of course, the PO is asking if we can increase the number of story points, considering the team has increased by 1 QA. This, of course, is an odd situation as most of the tasks we estimate require development, and since the development capacity is the same, we cannot estimate more. But from his side, he probably also cannot 'accept' that team has increased, but estimations are the same. So what are the common solutions to this?
The way I see it, a QA can handle some non-dev tickets like documentation, research, etc. So one way to satisfy both parties is for the next sprints to have one or two additional tickets (besides the 30 estimated ones) with the condition that those 1-2 are tickets that only require QA work. Any other suggestions?
I think I would maybe pull in at most one more small story for the first sprint they participate in. It might be better to not pull any in, and just let them pair with someone for a sprint or two.
Whether you pull in a new story or not, be sure to talk about this at the next retro. Did the new person speed the team up or slow the team down? Remember that the team velocity is a team velocity, so it's up to the team to decide if they are ready to pull in more stories in the next sprint.
I recommend you ramp up slowly after that first sprint. If you find room at the end of the sprint, that's a signal that you might be able to pull in an additional story at the next sprint. You won't have to guess if you can pull in more stories, the statistics from the sprint will tell you.
Let's say you have a small project. The team has estimated all the tasks as 300 days of effort.
I have 5 developers in the team, and I want MS Project to tell me when the project will complete considering vacations and working schedule of my team member.
In order to do that:
I'm creating a Task "Development" with fixed work "300d", and task type "Fixed Work".
Then I create 5 resources, and specify a 2 week vacation for one of the developers somewhere in the middle of the schedule.
Then I assign my 5 development resources to this task.
The problem is, the 300d distributed evenly to all 5 development resources. And If one of them have a two weeks vacation in between, due to that particular resource the work will be finished 2 weeks later, where other 4 resources are sitting and doing nothing for 2 weeks. Total duration is 70 days.
what I get
What I want to get is: work is distributed accordingly through all 5 resources unevenly in a way that the whole task finishes as earlier as possible taking most of the usable time from all developers.
That's how I would expect it to work. In that particular case I was distributing hours manually.
what i would expect
Is there a possibility in MS Project to do something like this? Or am I doing something wrong?
There are a couple issues with how you are approaching the problem.
1. Rather than just planning out the manpower hours estimated to be needed for the entire project on a single line item, You should plan out the tasks that will need to be done to accomplish "Small Project"
If you discretely plan out the tasks that need to be accomplished to satisfy the scope of "Small project", you can establish dependency (predecessor/successor) relationships between your tasks and figure out what tasks need to be done before you can move on to others. When you do this it will give you a good idea of how long the total duration of the project will take and likely be more accurate than just relying on an estimate based on the manpower hours estimate your developers give you. Find out what tasks they actually need to do, not just how many hours they think the whole project will take them. This will also allow you to plan out the utilization of your resources better because you'll be able to assign specific resources to specific tasks, and not all of your resources need to be on every task.
2. In general I would avoid using the Task Usage form.
I noticed you are altering resources in the task usage form, but unless you are really experienced with Microsoft Project I would avoid ever touching that, as it's really easy to set the period of performance of resources assigned to a task to be different than the actual period of performance of the task itself. This will cause MS Project to behave unusually, and it can be hard for an unexperienced user to understand why. This usually leads to pain and frustration. This leads me to my next bit of advice:
3. If you really want to specify a resource's vacation time, it's better to adjust the calendar associated the resource to exclude those dates as working dates.
In your situation with only 5 resources on your project, this can be fairly easy to do. You can accomplish this 2 different ways (I'll start with the easiest option):
1. You can add resource specific exclusion dates to the default calendar in your project
You can accomplish this by opening the Resource Sheet table and then clicking the Project tab then Change Working Times. If you have the Resource Sheet open instead of the Gantt chart, you can specify the resource that is going to be effected by the exceptions:
In this example you can see that I would be excluding (removing) 8/23/21 thru 9/3/21 as working days for the SW Engineer resource, without needing to change the calendar used by the resource completely.
2. You can completely change the calendar used by particular resources to be different than the default calendar set for the project.
You can accomplish this by going into the Resource Sheet and opening the Base Calendar column:
From here you can assign any calendar that exists in the project to the resource. Of course this means you would need to create the calendars and assign exclusion dates to them.
To create a calendar, click the Project tab then click Change Working Times. Click Create New Calendar on the form that opens up and give it a name:
From there you can add exclusion dates and all that.
Note: In a larger project with many resources, I would recommend not messing with the calendar for the resources at all. It just gets hard to deal with when there are a lot of resources.
I have two queries related to SCRUM. They are as follows:
I have read that the format of SCRUM story is "As a < type of user >, I want < some goal > so that < some reason >". I have to write a story for an API. This API will send an email with a link to validate the email address of the user. What will be the type of user here? Will it be the user logged in?
Do subtasks have story format similar to a story or it can be a normal description?
The trouble you are encountering is likely that you are starting from a determined implementation and then trying to work backwards to the need (unless your product is an API that your users leverage, in which case I think that answers your questions).
When we approach it from a user need, we'll usually end up with more of a problem statement, like
"As a vacationer, I'd like the site to calculate the best route across
all types of transportation for me so that I don't have to run many
searches to figure it out myself."
One of the pieces of delivering on this need will be creating the API calls if your application architecture calls for that. Then "add API method for aggregated call" may be a task under that user story.
You will have cases where all a particular story needs is API work, and that's fine, but it won't come out in the user story. For example, let's say we did the about user story but limited it to planes and trains for the first start, then we created another story that reads:
"As a vacationer in the US, I want my trip planner to factor in buses
so that I can make use of bus tours in my vacation."
Now, maybe the only task in there is to create a some API changes to include the bus routes in the search, but that doesn't cause a problem with your user stories because we started back at the user's problem statement in the beginning instead of starting at the desired implementation and working backward.
Let's start clarifying some concepts first.
Scrum is not an acronym so is written as Scrum (proper name). Then, there is nothing called "Scrum Stories". What you are referring to is called: user story. User stories were wide used in the Chrysler C3 project were eXtreme Programming was developed. Furthermore, you are referring to a particular template which was popularized by Mike Cohn known as canonical form. So it's ok to express your Product Backlog Item as user stories for an API. But take into account that you can use this template, you can use user stories or you can write the Product Backlog Item the way has more sense and value to you. In your case, which is the persona, machine or service which will be used the API?
About your second question. The Scrum Guide just says you should decompose your Sprint Planning in unit of work of 1 day or less. Normally, the implementation is to create this unit of work and call them task which are the work necessary to carry out the user story. The way the are written is open too but is not quite common to write them in the canonical form. So you can write it as an ID, title and a description.
I'm very new to phabricator, and I do not understand the term "Blocking Others" as it is used in the 'Active Revisions' dashboard. There are several bugs going back to (at least) Oct 2103 addressing this (
https://secure.phabricator.com/T1279#42118,
https://secure.phabricator.com/T4144, https://secure.phabricator.com/T10031), but I remain confused.
If I accept a revision, how can I configure Phabricator to place that revision in a non-obtrusive location until such time as it has changed and requires my attention again? I do not understand why all of the revisions that appear under the top heading "Blocking Others" are revisions on which I am the last person to take action and clearly do not require my attention. My current work flow is to completely ignore that section. I would like it to go away, but perhaps there is something I should understand that would make that section useful rather than annoying.
If you have Blocking Reviewers set up, the "Blocking Others" section can be confusing (since it's not you probably blocking the user). The item is blocked though. There are some upstream tasks on sorting this out better, see https://secure.phabricator.com/T4144.
i have been approached to build some websites for a few small businesses. They want a basic out of the box database driven website with some standard stuff (users, authentication, a few dynamic pages, etc). i am going to use asp.net mvc for this.
they have asked me how much i charge for this. my question, is that i have no frame of reference here. should i charge for the project a flat fee or a per hour charge. where do i start here to help determine correct pricing for a website project.
Charge an hourly fee that is about 3x the hourly rate you would command in a full-time job. The 3x multiplier basically evens things out for the benefits, etc. that you won't get as a 1099 employee.
Whatever you do, no matter how "Standard" it sounds. Do not charge a flat fee. Under that arrangement they have no incentive to curb feature creep. Even if you agree to a really tight spec up front, it is a recipe for disaster because it forces you to renegotiate every time they want something more. Under an hourly arrangement feature-creep works to your advantage.
Also, don't discount the hourly rate if you are a novice. Just don't bill unproductive hours. It is much easier to ease into billing more hours later than renegotiating the price per hour.
Charge per hour.
-- edit
So attempt to 'quote' it by estimating the number of hours. Make sure your estimate is conservative.
A nice approach is, in your head, consider the 'min', 'max', 'standard' type of time. Then use that to estimate the real time it will take you.
If you know that they know what they want and won't change the specs on you, go for a lump sum. That way you can work quickly.
If they are prone to change their minds and don't know what they want, go for an hourly fee. That way you won't be stuck working on their project for months without additional pay when they can't decide on exactly what they want.
I admit that I don't know much about this issue. However, I would still like to warn about the whole charge-per-hour mentality. While this approach basically protects the developer, it doesn't work well with the business owner:
Charge-per-hour, to the business owner, is a liability, whereas fix-price is just a cost. That's one.
The second thing is, if you are charging per hour, how are you going to justify your "research time"? Are you going to charge that as well? But business owner doesn't like to pay for research time. Or you can stick to your old trick and do something that has been reinvented N times and charge for the amount of time you spend. But that would seem unethical to some.
I have billed both by the hour and by the project. It's been my experience that customers are happier with project based billing instead of hourly billing.
With that in mind, I always pad the project cost by an amount I feel will cover the times when the client decides to change their mind. Further, I keep the project plan pretty simple. For example, I don't write 4 pages on how the login screen will work. Instead, It's a single bullet point: "Login Page". This allows both them and I a little flexibility.
Because I keep things simple AND I allow time for flexibility AND the clients know how much it's going to cost up front, my client's are happier and I can keep better track of my income. Also, I keep in pretty close contact with them. As long as you can keep the relationship good, you'll have a long term client.
Of course, it takes a bit of self discipline in combination with experience to know how long things take to build. Along these lines I never experiment on a client's dime. When I write the proposal, I already know what I'm going to use to get the job done and I've used those tools before. Because of this I can say with confidence that a login page will take a certain amount of time to put together.
Next, don't bite off more than you can chew. If it's a big project, break it up into smaller deliverables with their own pay schedule. That way the client (or you) can decide to walk away at any point. For example, if you think the project will take 3 months, break it up into 3 pieces. Incidentally, this helps with cash flow.
Finally, don't discount your time when getting started. That scares people.
I have a flat rate I charge for sites and outline exactly what they will get and then anything beyond that outline gets charged at an hourly rate. The hard part of this is if your getting into a project where your not sure how long it will take then you might want to break down the various pieces and then add at least 10 hours to that estimate. You don't want to sell yourself short but you also don't want to overcharge the customer. Be sure your clear up front that once the site is delivered then all changes are per hour or based on a maintenance fee structure.
Good luck.