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

[Max Binder]

>
>
>>    - Parenting is too cumbersome because it's not bidirectional.
>>
>> What exactly do you mean here?  I can think of:
>

Basically what you laid out. As tasks are created, there are far more
instances of "this is a child of X" than there are "X should be broken down
into Y." It's too hard to add a task to a parent. I suppose that can be a
process issue, where one is thinking up new things and fitting them into
existing parents/epics, and the other is breaking down an existing epic,
but in my experience the teams are more likely to come up with new ideas
and see how they fit. Frankly, that feels a little more "planning" rather
than "plan" anyway.

 What would make tagging (categorizing) less lossy?  The main thing coming
> to mind it to easily see untagged things, in order to create a feedback
> loop where you can instantly see what's still untagged and tag it.  How
> would that work?


I think the new board UI helps with this, by showing project tags on cards,
but if there are a lot of cards it's still not easy. The primary motivation
for getting a product owner to tag is the disarray they will feel if
something is not tagged. Additionally, if you want a parent to have a tag,
but not the child (such as with the "Milestone" project), you have to
manually fix that, and I've observed that most people forget.

Phlogiston has mitigated this, some, by showing that if you don't follow
process then you won't get your reports.



On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 11:43 AM, Joel Aufrecht <jaufrecht at wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 10:09 AM, Max Binder <mbinder at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> I think the appeal of Subprojects is that they offer a new alternative to
>> the clunky UI that Phab offers for tagging/parenting/columning. What I'd
>> love to see is what "clunk" is relieved and, inevitably, what clunk is
>> added. Ultimately, my main issue is that all the ways we've identified, for
>> tracking tasks in Phab, are lossy. All the options for organizing work
>> after the fact, but are not terribly approachable (and thus not terribly
>> sustainable).
>>
>>    - Parenting is too cumbersome because it's not bidirectional.
>>
>> What exactly do you mean here?  I can think of:
>
>    - From a child, it should be possible to choose the parent.
>       - Currently, this relationship can only be constructed by opening
>       the parent, entering the child's name in a search function, and selecting
>       it from a list.
>       - It would be an improvement simply to be able to type in child IDs
>       somewhere on the parent (since that's easier than the name search thing if
>       you have the ID handy), but actually better would be to open the child,
>       click "Add Blocks", and pick titles (or IDs)
>    - Data model and UI that differentiates between child/parent terms and
>    blocked by/blocks.
>       - Enforcement of acyclic directed trees for parent-child
>    - While looking at a task, see the parent or parents (in the detail,
>    or on the card, or in a tooltip for the card).
>
>
>>    - Tagging is lossy because it's too easy to forget to do it, and
>>    sometimes the wrong default tags are applied by default (such as when
>>    creating a subtask).
>>
>> What would make tagging (categorizing) less lossy?  The main thing coming
> to mind it to easily see untagged things, in order to create a feedback
> loop where you can instantly see what's still untagged and tag it.  How
> would that work?
>
>>
>>    - Columns are workable but they cause a loss of priority of tasks
>>    across columns.
>>
>>
>
>> I guess my question/hope for Subprojects is, "Is it easy to use?"
>>
> It isn't right now, because moving a task from Project to Subproject is no
> easier than changing it from Project A to Project B: in both cases you have
> to edit the task, choose to change projects, enter a partial name for the
> new (sub)project, and select it.  There's no way while looking at a project
> board to see the subproject tasks, or even to know what the subprojects are
> or that there are any -- you have to click the "Subprojects" option in the
> left menu.  So the only benefit in the UI right now for Subprojects is that
> you can filter a search by a project and get back subproject's tasks.
> Which is a use case I haven't seen any teams need yet, actually.
>
> Milestones have more UI functionality: When you create a Milestone, it by
> default is presented as a column in its parent project's workboard.  so you
> can assign tasks to Milestones within a project via drag-and-drop, and you
> can see all tasks in all Milestones within a project.  If that
> functionality were available for Subprojects, that has some immediate uses.
>
>
>>
>>
>
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