[teampractices] How to best track the work within Phabricator Epic tasks

Joel Aufrecht jaufrecht at wikimedia.org
Tue Jan 17 17:45:59 UTC 2017


Trying image attachment again.

I didn't start out to be a naysayer though. I am really replying to to
>> share some team practices with the group based on experience with the
>> #Scap3 project.
>>
>
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/1449/ is the parent
> project. It could be a sub-project under our team project but it's
> currently a top-level project. The top level workboard is mostly for
> backlog and high-level categorization of the tasks. We have created
> milestones that approximately correspond to quarterly goals. When something
> moves from backlog it can go into a future milestone, the current milestone
> or into the "debt" column for a future tech debt sprint. Further
> prioritization and progress tracking happens within each milestones'
> workboard:
>
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/subprojects/1449/
>
> We still end up with epic tasks and the phabricator task graph helps with
> those but I think milestones are nice for this sort of thing. Milestones
> could represent any amount of work, not just quarterly goals, however, the
> key advantage in keeping them small is that you can easily see everything
> on one screen. So I would recommend scoping your milestones so that they
> are limited to whatever you feel is a manageable set of tasks that doesn't
> become overwhelming to look at.
>

There may be two separate issues worth considering here: How we use epics
or other tools to groups bundles of tasks "tactically", at the range of
about 3 to 15 tasks, for daily management, and how we group tasks for
longer-term and bigger planning.  Once we get beyond one screen-ful of
tasks, we need aggregate reporting to effectively track them.

So, Milestones are good for looking at a countable number of tasks (~7 or
less) as a group.  For managing larger quantities of tasks, aggregate
reports are essential.  For example:


​
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/teampractices/attachments/20170117/9ab827fa/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: sc3_backlog_burnup_count_showhidden.png
Type: image/png
Size: 49476 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/teampractices/attachments/20170117/9ab827fa/attachment-0001.png>


More information about the teampractices mailing list