[teampractices] Document what should be a column on Phab workboards and what better not?

[Subramanya Sastry]

I did not see this email till now. Yes, the Parsoid board is a weird mix 
of columns right now .... I was experimenting with what makes sense and 
I initially thought of making it process-specific, and then thought 
perhaps it can be a place for easy access to different categories of 
tasks which would otherwise be lost in the backlog .. and it actually 
helped us fix a few things by surfacing them in the columns .. but the 
net result was that it became a mix of different kinds of columns.

I think a dashboard that gives us a bird's-eye view of the various 
subprojects (even if not the entire list of tickets) would have been 
useful and I was probably abusing the workboard for it.

But, I am now thinking of removing some of the columns that can be 
subprojects and use the custom queries that you mention below. But, the 
custom queries would have to be bookmarks or be stored on some wiki page 
.. so it does feel like there is a missing UI feature somewhere.

But, good practices and recommendations are welcome,

Thanks,
Subbu.

On 01/26/2015 05:18 PM, Andre Klapper wrote:
> Hi,
>
> while I have not yet found a way to follow creation of Phabricator
> project workboards, I recently had the opportunity to look at the
> Parsoid board at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/487/
> and wondered if there are potential recommendations to document.
>
> (Sorry for picking Parsoid, it's just that you nice guys sat next to me
> so I could look over your shoulder. I'd love to watch more teams using
> workboards, so we can learn from each other and improve together.)
>
> Please correct if I am wrong:
>
> To me some columns on the Parsoid board look process-oriented ('In
> Progress', 'Requires Progress'); some look like time-independant generic
> classification ('robustness'; maybe 'testing').
>
> Phabricator offers global 'Performance' and 'Technical Debt' project
> tags, so my recommendation would be tagging tasks in those columns
> accordingly (instead of using a column), combined with saving a custom
> query to share among the team members (see [1]) to find those issues.
> Classification that's not generic enough could be Parsoid-* tags instead
> (see [2] for already existing ones). That solves the problem that a task
> can have 0-∞ projects associated, while a task can only be in ONE column
> on a workboard.
>
> Does that make sense? If yes, should
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Project_management#Setting_up_a_Workboard_or_Sprint_Board
> be extended to cover "what kind of stuff should be workboard columns,
> what should be tags", and could someone put that into words?
>
> Thank you,
> andre
>
> [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Help#Custom_queries_in_Maniphest
> [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/query/all/?after=Parso