I'm new to TFS, and using the 2013 edition. What is meant by iteration path?
I see this when clicking on Work > Backlogs > Backlog and then it allows you to create a new User story or Bug with a dropdown for iteration path.
they're your sprints, you set start and stop dates against them so that you can allocate people to tasks and see how it's all going in your sprint.
The iteration dropdown is meant to be used to further separate your backlog areas into iterations and releases.
See here for more information on Areas and Iterations.
Related
Sorry if this is a dumb question. I'm still a somewhat novice dev.
I'm interested in creating a holistic view that shows the current status of every airflow job my team maintains. The point would be to simplify the view rather than having the user go into the Airflow UI to check the status. I would be interested in something along the lines of a front-end webpage that has a list of each of the DAGs and kind of a progress bar whose length depends on the number of tasks for each DAG. If a task is currently running, it would be light-green, solid green for success and red for failures. Similar to the Airflow UI but a lot simpler. I would also want the home view to show the current day with a left and right arrow to go through each day if the user is interested. Essentially it would be a airflow monitoring system for less technical users.
What would be a good way to go about this?
I'm also open to any other solutions anyone may have come up that could help with simplify monitoring a large amount of airflow jobs.
Kind of looking for some folks to help me brainstorm. Not sure if Stack is the right place for it. :)
I'll be the developer of this app so no need to pull punches as far as the technical end goes.
Currently, I'm thinking of using a standard web app where the screen will be populated by a log that I'll keep in a backend database that gets populated by a function that gets called whenever a task concludes within a DAG. The view will always show current day and whichever DAGs are scheduled to run during that day with whatever their progress is.
Airflow allows creating plugins to expose web views with FlaskAppBuilder, so you can create a view and add whatever you want in it, then add it to the Airflow UI.
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.
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.
I'll go straigth to the point. We need to represent on MS Project the payment of a compensation for an accident to one worker in particular and only that one. But we can't figure out how to do it!
We are kind of new to this software (and actually are only using it for a colleage assigment). We have two separated files, one for the task and another one for our resources. We've searched everywhere on the infromation of the resoruce in the Resoruces file but could not find anything.
Any idea? Thank you very much for reading and, please, forgive me if my English is kind of messy sometimes, it is not my native language.
This is sort of a workaround, but if you go to your Resource Sheet view and double click on the resource, you can go to the Costs tab and enter a new rate (probably distributed over an 8 hour day) effective on the day of the payment, then add a third rate effective the day after the payment which is the same as the original. It should have the same effect.
The company I work for has just purchased 4 32" LCD screens to be mounted at the front of the office for demonstration purposes. Whilst we are not demonstrating (most of the time), the screens are to be used as development information screens for the whole team.
What information would people recommend displaying to be most useful to the team? Our focus is on hosted business web-apps but I am interested in what other teams doing other types of development find useful too. Pointers on how to gather the displayed information would be useful also.
Information about your continuous integration status.
Major Development Milestones that have been hit in the last week
Releases within the last month (including a short description why this release is awesome)
Use it as motivational board. The achievements of software development are seldom communicated well enough.
Since you're hosting apps for your customers, server and network status information would probably be useful.
Heck, why not create a "chat room" for the dev team to discuss issues and post a streaming version of that as well?
Schedule information, Scrum notes from that morning, a gantt chart...the possibilities abound.
Outstanding bugcount, sorted by priority and severity. You can likely get this from your bugtracking tool programmatically.
Depending on your process management
system, possibly a list of feature
requests and the percentage complete
on each of them. Again, you can probably get this programmatically from your process management / time tracking tool.
Time spent in the current development
cycle, and time remaining. Again, this should be available from your process / management / time tracking tool. You may want to use this data with your bugcounts as well to give a bugs / day fix rate.
If you're a public company with a
profit-sharing plan (i.e. stock or
options), the current price of the
stock (this can be surprisingly
strongly motivating). You can get stock data from several sources online programmatically (although a small delay may be injected unless you're paying for the service).
The movie 'Office Space'
Weather radar from intellicast.com
Latest Checkin.
Number of checkins per day
Number of customers that use software
Metrics on Bugs found/fixed and the ratio.
One screen could be an aggregated RSS feed of development topics pulled from sites such as Stack Overflow (or even Coding Horror). Not sure what your goal for these screens is, but I could see it useful to me if you had a feed with topics specific to your development team headlined. If I were there, I'd glimpse them, maybe catch an interesting thread, and go learn something. Funnel a bunch of keywords and tags through a Yahoo Pipe and dump it to the screen.
That's if they are more "informal and informational."
I think most popular pages from your webapp(s) would be a fun/interesting thing to show on a big monitor up front.
Another would be a live feed of your error reporting.
We have one monitor showing all meetings for the day, with start-end, subject, and room. I find this helpful, not only for my orientation, but also to see what other people do at our company.
xkcd, bunny, dilbert and savage chickens :-)