[teampractices] Triaging bugs and managing task backlog in Phabricator

[Antoine Musso]

Le 02/12/2014 22:32, S Page a écrit :
>   Do other teams have team boards in Phabricator?

Sure!

MediaWiki-Core-Team:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/37/

Release-Engineering:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/20/

The later being my team.  Among other projects, we are responsible for
the Beta cluster (staging area) and Continuous Integration which have
their own boards:

CI: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/401/
Beta cluster: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/497/

CI uses software components such as jenkins and zuul which might well
have their own boards. I merely load the default page which list opened
task, ex for 'zuul': https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/zuul/


For both beta cluster and CI, only parent / tracking tasks are marked
with the team project.  That helps keep the team workboard light weight
for our weekly team check-ins.


As the lead for CI, I open the workboards several times per day and move
cards around as needed. I even created my own dashboard which I have
'installed' as the default Phabricator homepage:

 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/dashboard/view/6/

It has:

- a text box with links to the board / projects that matter to me
- tasks assigned to me by priority
- tasks I authored
- team related searches
- all tasks I am subscribed to

That let me look for a task using my browser search.


Some troubles I have:


I often end up closing tasks without moving to the appropriate column.
That is merely to save a few page loads and clicks. Once closed, a task
disappear from the workboard, so it is imho not much of an issue.


Often tasks are blocked by another team / project. I am considering
opening sub task for the other team so they can assign/set priority
according to their rule / triage workflow.  So I would end up with:

 T42 install more servers for CI
  project: continuous-integration
  assignee: me!
  priority:  high
  column: externally blocked

 T43 install servers for CI
  project: operations
  assignee: none
  priority: need triage
  column:  backlog

This way it is clear that CI wise I am responsible for that action, on
the other hand it is clear that ops need to acknowledge it.

Potentially each card could have a per project assignee/priority much
like they have a per project column.


We are still iterating / figuring out a good workflow. I guess it would
take us all a few more weeks to refine.


-- 
Antoine "hashar" Musso