[teampractices] Initial impressions of functionality of sub-projects and milestones

[Joel Aufrecht]

In an attempt to understand what habits and processes we will want to
change to take advantage of new Phabricator functionality, I've tried to
spell out what behaves differently (this overlaps existing documentation,
of course, but I'm trying to focus on a day-to-day usability perspective):

Projects can have subprojects.  A subproject behaves like a regular
project, and moving a task between a project and sub-project is the same as
moving a task between two unrelated projects, except:

   1. Filtering by project matches all Sub-Project tasks.
   2. Moving a task from a project to a sub-project does auto-remove the
   parent project.
   3. It's very easy to navigate from viewing a sub-project to viewing a
   project, via the breadcrumb trail (one click, always in the same place,
   always present; and then a page reload).
   4. It's possible, and maybe easier than searching, but not trivial, to
   navigate from projects to sub-projects.  You have to click on Sub-Projects
   in the left nav, wait for page reload, see the list of projects, identify
   the one you want, click on it, and wait for page reload.
   5. Subprojects often appear in the UI as Project > sub-project, but they
   appear in name completion as Sub-project, so if you name your sub-project
   "bugs", it will be really confusing in completion.  Ideas: A) change
   functionality to somehow include project in completion.  B) name
   sub-projects with a prefix naming convention, such as "Phlogiston" > "
   Phlogiston↝Burnup-support".
   6. A task can belong to two different sub-projects within the same
   project.

Milestones are also regular projects, except:

   1. They can be a child of a project or sub-project, but can't be a child
   of another milestone.
   2. Milestones also appear as columns in their parent project, and so
   tasks in a project can be moved to milestones via drag and drop, which
   AFAIK is the only way tasks can be assigned to projects via drag and drop.
   3. A task can't belong to both a project and to a milestone in that
   project; if it's in the milestone, adding the milestone's parent project to
   it removes the milestone (but, possible bug, in the UI it still appears in
   the Milestone's column).
   4. Milestone names are not directly available in autocomplete.  Instead,
   you see the parent (sub)project, followed by the Milestone name in
   parenthesis.
   5. I think this means that Milestone project names can safely have
   spaces?  Autocomplete works, is there anything else at risk from spaces in
   project names?)
   6. You can't assign a new task to a project and to a milestone in that
   project in one action; it takes several full steps.
   7. There's some UI for autonumbering milestones in sequence.



*--Joel Aufrecht*
Team Practices Group
Wikimedia Foundation
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