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.
Related
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.
these days I’m facing a fundamental problem – let’s call it an architectural design decision.
So my team and I build typical line of business (lob)-web-applications for my company. For my purpose, lob means especially this:
A lot of user-interaction (entering data, CRUD entities, display data, aggregating data, statistics and reports, validation and so on)
Very restrictive (users have to login, users have different permission-levels, they can make different kinds of changes on different entities, display various reports and so on)
For an example, let’s take an ordinary approval-workflow: I need a new laptop, so I go to the “ressources-webApp” and create a new purchase requisition. My boss gets a notification and has to approve my request. In the next step, the proper department has to buy the laptop and finish my requisition.
I know this is a simple “hello world”-example and in real life you would use an existing software for this purpose (SAP or something like that), but it describes my use-case pretty well: data-driven and very restrictive (I can see all requisitions of my department but only change or delete my ones, I should not see the page for the approval or call the approval-api, my boss should only see the requests of his employees but not for the empolyees of another department, neither my boss nor I should see the page or be able to finish a requisition and so on).
Currently we are using ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI in combination with angularjs 1. For each “action” (page or view) exists a mvc-controller which listens to a specific route and returns the appropriate view. Each view references a specific angular-controller. Also each view may consist of different “partial views” (components or controls). To handle data the angular-controller calls webAPI-controllers which also listen to specific routes and handle the request (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE). Each controller (mvc and webAPI) checks the authorization-token of each http-request which comes in a cookie, if the user is allowed to open the page or call the action.
Now I’m wondering how to do this in a SPA-application with angular 2. Angular 2 sounds pretty interesting for me and has some nice benefits over angular 1, so I want to try angular 2. It seems that with angular 2 you only can build a SPA-application (compared to the “classical” MPA-application I mentioned above, where every page comes from the server and contains a angular-controller).
Generally I’m not disinclined to SPA, but I’m not sure how to handle the security-questions mentioned above.
In addition there are other common problems with SPA: not working back-buttons from the browser, no way to enter a specific url directly to the browser, no bookmarking etc.
So, do you have any advice, tip or best practice for me? Do you think that SPA is a good “pattern” for lob-web-applications? And if yes, how would you handle the security-problems as well as the other common SPA-problems?
Best regards,
Alex
I'm sorry if this is not within the acceptable question guidelines for Stack Overflow, but I am feeling stumped, and I feel that what I'm trying to do might just be incredibly simple for some of the veterans here.
I've set up an Ubercart on a Drupal installation for a small gym website. What they are wanting is to allow a customer to register and pay for various memberships for their children (youth flag football, teeball, etc.). One person may come back and sign up multiple times throughout the year, and each customer may have multiple children who can each participate in multiple programs.
What I'm thinking is to disable anonymous checkout on Ubercart. The customer billing address will be the saved information for the "parent." I'm thinking that the parents could create Members (their children) which could be stored in a content type called Members and the Members could be linked to the programs of which they are a member via entity reference. The children could maintain their relationship to their parents by authorship.
I've been trying to work through this for the last few hours. Does anyone know of a way the I can accomplish this--maybe with rules? I'm thinking some kind of credit system in which for each quantity of a membership (per program) that they pay for, they get one "credit" to create one entity reference between a member and a program.
Any brainstorming and help on this topic would be majorly appreciated. Thanks.
Your use case sounds more like event registration than selling memberships. Each class would be an event that parents would register their children for. It may seem like overkill here, but I would use something like CiviCRM or RedHen CRM for this. Both support the concept of relationships between members and provide event management tools. You could make each class an event that people would sign up for, pay (they could even register multiple children at the same time) and get a receipt. The event history information would be stored so parents could sign in and see what each child has done. You could even make the list of kids in the class public so parents could see who else is in the class.
Afterward, it would be easy to put together a survey to send to the "attendees" to get feedback on the event/class and notify them about future events. I can think of a dozen different things that these systems cover that you may need in the future (early bird event registration, special pricing for returning parents/children, activity reports to email to parents every year so they can see what their children did...).
You may be able to pull together modules and custom content types (Ubercart Event Registration module as a starting point), but a CRM would provide the things you are looking for now, and the features your customer will be asking for in the future.
We're investigating Alfresco for doing wideband delphi ("planning poker") based on submitted statements of work (collected user stories). I've been reading through the Alfresco documentation, and there are two questions that I haven't been able to get clear answers to:
Can we set it up so users can write, but not read, to a folder or node? (To support "anonymous" planning, without users knowing what the other users submitted estimates were)
Can workflow tasks be implemented to ask users to comment or submit items to a node or director with the above model, rather than just simple approve or deny?
Workflow:
User submits a statement of work
All users (or selected users at random, or ... ) in group get notice to review
Reviews include estimates on the overall SOW or specific phases
Reviews are anonymous/secret to all but the manager
Have you implemented something similar in Alfresco with fine grained access control? Sharing your experience would be very helpful... i'm not looking for someone to do the work for me, just to confirm it can be done.
I would use some kind of parallel workflow for this.
First the managers starts the workflow and the task type of this first node will have additional info about the user story and such, then the manager selects a people or a group to which it will send this user story.
Here comes the parallel thing into play. Because it's parallel noone sees the results of the other members of the workflow. The members fill in the requested fields (another custom task type with data like: score (estimate) and maybe explanation.
Before the workflow goes back to manager the automatic calculations are made in a non-user task/node where you calculate overall score for the story. You can include each individual user and their score in the result/report if necessary.
Now the results are sent to the manager.
Important: This question isn't actually really an ASP.NET question. Anyone who knows anything about URLS can answer it. I just happen to be using ASP.NET routing so included that detail.
In a nutshell my question is :
"What URL format should I design that i can give to external parties to get to a specific place on my site that will be future proof. [I'm new to creating these 'REST' URLs]."
I need an ASP.NET routing URL that will be given to a third party for tracking marketing campaigns. It is essentially a 'gateway' URL that redirects the user to a specific page on our site which may be the homepage, a special contest or a particular product.
In addition to trying to capture the referrer I will need to receive a partnerId, a campaign number and possibly other parameters. I want to provide a route to do this BUT I want to get it right first time because obviously I cant easily change it once its being used externally.
How does something like this look?
routes.MapRoute(
"3rd-party-campaign-route",
"campaign/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}",
new
{
controller = "Campaign",
action = "Redirect",
custom = (string)null // optional so we need to set it null
}
);
campaign : possibly don't want the word 'campaign' in the actual link -- since users will see it in the URL bar. i might change this to just something cryptic like 'c'.
destination : dictates which page on our site the link will take the user to. For instance PR to direct the user to products page.
partnerid : the ID for the company that we've assigned - such as SO for Stack overflow.
campaignid : campaign id such as 123 - unique to each partner. I have realized that I think I'd prefer for the 3rd party company to be able to manage the campaign ids themselves rather than us providing a website to 'create a campaign'. I'm not
completely sure about this yet though.
custom : custom data (optional). i can add further custom data parameters without breaking existing URLS
Note: the reason i have 'destination' is because the campaign ID is decided upon by the client so they need to also tell us where the destination of that campaign is. Alternatively they could 'register' a campaign with us. This may be a better solution to avoid people putting in random campaign IDs but I'm not overly concerned about that and i think this system gives more flexibility.
In addition we want to know perhaps which image they used to link to us (so we can track which banner works the best). I THINK this is a candiate for a new campaignid as opposed to a custom data field but i'm not sure.
Currently I am using a very primitive URL such as http://example.com?cid=123. In this case the campaign ID needs to be issued to the third party and it just isn't a very flexible system. I want to move immediately to a new system for new clients.
Any thoughts on future proofing this system? What may I have missed? I know i can always add new formats but I want to use this format as much as possible if that is a good idea.
This URL:
"campaign/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}",
...doesn't look like a resource to me, it looks like a remote method call. There is a lot of business logic here which is likely to change in the future. Also, it's complicated. My gut instinct when designing URLs is that simpler is generally better. This goes double when you are handing the URL to an external partner.
Uniform Resource Locators are supposed to specify, well, resources. The destination is certainly a resource (but more on this in a moment), and I think you could consider the campaign a resource. The partner is not a resource you serve. Custom is certainly not a resource, as it's entirely undefined.
I hear what you're saying about not wanting to have to tell the partners to "create a campaign," but consider that you're likely to eventually have to go down this road anyway. As soon as the campaign has any properties other than the partner identifier, you pretty much have to do this.
So my first to conclusions are that you should probably get rid of the partner ID, and derive it from the campaign. Get rid of custom, too, and use query string parameters instead, should it be necessary. It is appropriate to use query string parameters to specify how to return a resource (as opposed to the identity of the resource).
Removing those yields:
"campaign/{destination}/{campaignid}",
OK, that's simpler, but it still doesn't look right. What's destination doing in between campaign and campaign ID? One approach would be to rearrange things:
"campaign/{campaignid}/{destination}",
Another would be to use Astoria-style indexing:
"campaign({campaignid})/{destination}",
For some reason, this looks odd to a lot of people, but it's entirely legal. Feel free to use other legal characters to separate campaign from the ID; the point here is that a / is not the only choice, and may not be the appropriate choice.
However...
One question we haven't covered yet is what should happen if/when the user submits a valid destination, but an invalid campaign or partner ID. If the correct response is that the user should see an error, then all of the above is still valid. If, on the other hand, the correct response is that the user should be silently taken to the destination page anyway, then the campaign ID is really a query string parameter, not a part of the resource. Perhaps some partners wouldn't like being given a URL with a question mark in it, but from a purely REST point of view, I think that's the right approach, if the campaign ID's validity does not determine where the user ends up. In this case, the URL would be:
"campaign/{destination}",
...and you would add a query string parameter with the campaign ID.
I realize that I haven't given you a definite answer to your question. The trouble is that most of this rests on business considerations which you are probably aware of, but I'm certainly not. So I'm more trying to cover the philosophy of a REST-ful URL, rather than attempting to explain your business to you. :)
I think the URL rewriting is getting out of hand a little bit lately. Not everything belongs to the URL. After all, a URL is supposed to describe a resource that can be searched for, discovered or manipulated and it seems to me that at least the partner ID and the custom fields from above are not part of the resource.
Not to mention that that at some point you would like to actually keep the partner ID constant across multiple campaigns and that means that it is now orthogonal to the particular places they need to visit. If you keep these as parameters, you will allow your partners to access uniformly multiple resources on your website, while still reliably identifying themselves, so you can track their participation in any of your campaigns.
It looks like you've covered all of your bases. The only suggestion I have is to change
{custom}
to
{*custom}
That way, if you ever need to accept further parameters, you don't have to take the chance that old URLs will get a 404. For example:
If you have a URL that looks like:
campaign/PR/SO/123
and you decide in the future that you would like to accept a fourth and fifth parameter:
campaign/PR/SO/123/blah/foo
then the first URL will still be valid, because you're using a wildcard character in {*custom}. "blah/foo" would be passed as a string to your action. To get those extra two parameters, you would simply split the custom argument in your action by '/'. Add some friendly error handling if they don't exist and you've successfully changed the amount of information you can receive with a campaign URL without completely breaking URLs already in the wild.
Why not use URL encoded variables instead of routes? They're a lot more flexible - you can add any new features in the future while still maintaining 100% backwards compatibility. Admittedly, it's a little more trouble to type manually, but if there's all those parameters anyway, it's already no picnic.
http://mysite.com/page?campaign=1&dest=products&pid=15&cid=25
To me, this is much more indicative of what is really going on. Using paths implies a that a resource exists at that location. But really you're just providing a web service with various parameters, and this model captures that much more clearly. And in the future, you can add more parameters effortlessly. You can also default parameters if they are missing without messing anything up.
Not sure of the code in ASP, but it should be trivial to implement.
I think I'd look at doing it the way that SO does it's questions.
"campaign/{campaign-id}/friendly-name-of-campaign"
Create a mapping in your database when the campaign is created that associates all the data you need with an automatically generated id. The friendly name could be assigned basically the same way as a question is on SO -- by the user -- but you could also have an approval process that makes sure that it meets your requirements and is distinct from any existing campaign names. Your tracking company can track by the id and you can correlate that with your associated data with a simple look up.
What you have looks good for your needs. The other posts here have good points. But may not be suitable for you. One thing that you could consider with future proofing your links is to put a version number somewhere in there.
"campaign/{version}/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}"
This way if you decide to completely change your format you can up the version to 2.0 (or whatever) and still keep track of the old links coming in.
I would do
/c/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/?customvar=s
You should think about the hierarchy of the first parameters, you already got that managed quite well. Only if there's a hierarchy path segments should be used.
From your description, destination seems to be the broadest parameter, partnerid only works with destination, and campaingid is specific to a partner.
When you really need to add custom parameters I would go for query variables (they are not forbidden in REST), because these are not part of the hierarchy.
You also shouldn't try to be too RESTful here. After all, it's for a campaign and for redirecting to a final resource. So the URL you want to design here is not really a specific resource in the terms of REST.
Create an URL called http://mysite.com/gateway
Return an HTML form, tell your partners to fill in the form and POST it. Redirect based on the form values.
You could easily provide your partners with the javascript to do the GET and POST. Should be trivial.
The most important thing i have learned about REST URL´s thats usually burried deep in some book or article:
The URL should point to a resource and the following ?querystring should have all the scoping information needed. DONT mix those two or you will have a design thats very hard to work with.
Other then that i fully agree with Craig Stuntz