[teampractices] Use cases for work tracking, sub-projects, etc in Phabricator

[Joel Aufrecht]

Hi,

I'm trying to work out, on behalf of VE, exactly how we would want to use
the new sub-project and milestone functionality.  Without going into a full
requirements analysis, I wanted to try to enumerate key use cases and think
through how they are currently met with Phabricator UI (without
sub-projects), how we could use sub-projects, and what data model or UI
changes might be necessary to improve on current processes.  The list below
starts with VE, and I would be excited to see how other teams are doing
these things (or what other use cases are important):

*Triage*

*As a Product Owner, I want to categorize and prioritize incoming tasks so
that they can be worked on by the right people at the right time.*
VE does this with a weekly triage meeting in which the Product Owner views
all new tasks in the last week, in order of submission (or reversed), and
triages one at a time.  Specifically, the PO looks at tasks in the default
column of the VisualEditor project, edits the Priority field, possibly adds
a comment, and drags the task to a different column.  In VE, the columns
represent different
[initiatives/ultra-milestones/goals/tranches/categories] (for example,
"Rich Media" or "Language Support").

*Overview (grooming)*

*As a Product Owner with new priorities, I want to alter the backlog for my
project to reflect new priorities.*
VE does this via the PO adding and renaming columns and moving tasks
between columns on the work board.  (All VE work is on a single workboard,
which means it's all in one project.)  We have also experimented with using
the "Blocked By" relationship to identify a tree of related tasks, but this
is not visible in Phabricator workboards (nor can ancestor Blocked-By be
seen or sorted or filtered on) and can only be seen in Phlogiston reports.


*As a Product Owner with knowledge of work in my project, I want to review
the backlog for my project so that I can see if the backlog is current and
correct compared to reality.*
In VE, this has two parts: First, are tasks in right categories?  This
normally happens in triage, but the Product Owner occasionally notices
something out of place (a task in the wrong column) while examining the
board view for other purposes.  Second, are categories right in relation to
one another?  This happens when the PO looks at the board, but more often
when the PO looks at the Phlogiston report that shows not only columns but
also task family (blocked by)-based categorizations.

VE sometimes does overall work planning (in the style of Scrum card
mapping, where tasks from different areas/columns are all sliced into
different releases/rows) from the board.  I've already heard that some
teams have approximated Scrum card mapping by using "dummy tasks" in
columns, so that tasks above or below that task in a column can be
perceived to be in a theoretical "row" that may be consistent across
columns.

The main activity in VE that isn't supported adequately in Phabricator is
mixing blocked-by relationships and columns.  For example, VE may have 50
tasks in the "Language" column, and five of those tasks may all be set to
block a "Release Korean support".  Those six tasks comprise "sub-category"
within Language, where Language is a broad, long-term grouping and "Release
Korean support" is a subset with a fixed scope.  There is no way directly
in Phabricator to see, in one view, which tasks share the same blocking
relationship.  One way to support this in Phabrictor would be to add a
display field in the task and/or task card showing the ancestor "blocks"
task(s).  Currently we can see this in aggregate, but not per-task, in
Phlogiston reports.  The sub-project construct supports the same underlying
data relationship, but in a different, reversed way: in Phabricator, you
can filter on a project and you will see all tasks belonging to
sub-projects.

*Decide what to work on next*
*As someone doing work in a project, I want to use category and priority
and assignment information to figure out which task to work on next.*

Normally, VE team members do this via consultation with the Product Owner,
but on occasion they navigate to the VE work board and look at the top of
the columns they are working on to identify new work.

*Definitions*
"Category" refers to fields differentiating the type of work or subject of
the work (which software package, which team, which website, etc) that
people use to filter tasks.  I've seen teams use project tags, project
columns, blocked by relationships, and tacit conventions about task
placement within Phabricator project boards, and combinations thereof, to
categorize work.  "Priority" refers to any task information used to
determine relative importance; I'm aware of teams using either the Priority
field, or position and rank within a Phabricator project or columns, or
both.



*--Joel Aufrecht*
Team Practices Group
Wikimedia Foundation
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