I have an issue on gitlab, #1. This issue when it was created it contained two tasks.
Is there a way to mention/reference/close one of the two tasks in a git commit ?
Not yet, but at least you can define tasks in an issue now.
This comes with GitLab 15.3 (Aug. 2022)
Create tasks in issues
Tasks provide a robust way to refine an issue into smaller, discrete work units.
Previously in GitLab, you could break down an issue into smaller parts using markdown checklists within the description.
However, these checklist items could not be easily assigned, labeled, or managed anywhere outside of the description field.
You can now create tasks within issues from the Child Items widget.
Then, you can open the task directly within the issue to quickly update the title, set the weight, or add a description.
Tasks break down work within projects for GitLab Free and increase the planning hierarchy for our GitLab Premium customers to three levels (epic, issue, and task).
In our next iteration, you will be able to add labels, milestones, and iterations to each task.
Tasks represent our first step toward evolving issues, epics, incidents, requirements, and test cases to work items.
If you have feedback or suggestions about tasks, please comment on this issue.
See Documentation and Epic.
Related
I'm currently using GitLab Enterprise in a team project. I now want to build out a board-based roadmap similar to Pivotal Tracker, Aha or Trello. (For this view, each month would be a "list" or Aha "milestone". We could then drag roadmap items from one month to another and the whole team can see where we are and our Issue priorities visually.)
I'm hoping we can only use GitLab for this and not need to integrate yet another tool.
In the "Boards" section of GitLab, I see I can make lists from GitLab Labels. This is OK, but I'd really like to make lists from GitLab Milestones. (Otherwise, I'd need to make another Milestone just to capture everything in the label.)
Am I missing something? Or is that really the best way to approach this with GitLab?
There is a roadmap feature for GitLab (premium/ultimate only)
It has evolved with GitLab 14.8 (February 2022)
Additional display options for roadmaps
In this release, we have introduced additional progress tracking capabilities to roadmaps. You can now view the percentage of completed epics based on issue count instead of issue weight. This functionality is useful for organizations that are using Kanban or other methodologies that don’t require their teams to set a weight on issues.
You can now also customize the level of milestones to include in your roadmap, allowing you to tailor your view to meet the needs of your audience.
See Documentation and Issue.
Milestones weren't designed with this use case in mind. Generally, once an issue is assigned to a Milestone, it doesn't change.
A common use case for milestones is to track Sprints or Iterations as milestones. The milestone's start and due dates would be the sprint start/end date respectively. During planning. issues would be tied to the appropriate milestone based on the sprint. If the work isn't finished by the due date (within the sprint period) the milestone stays the same.
Another use case is to use a milestone to track a scheduled release. In this case the start date can be empty, and the due date would be the release date. With this, if the release is missed the milestone still stays the same (ie, the issues are still attached the same) but it's completed after the due date.
Milestones do give some useful views about the attached issues, but not a board to move issues between them. Like you mentioned the only way to do that is with Labels, but they should work fine. You can customize the Labels you want to show up on a Board, and they order they're in. The only annoying (to me) thing about boards is that you can't get rid of the Open/Close lists, you can only collapse them. Looking at this issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/37747) I doubt it will ever happen.
If you use gitlab.com, https://gitboard.co/ has the milestone or epic board which could help your case. The auto sprint could create and close the regular scheduled milestone/sprint or whatever you call it.
I am reading a lot about Gherkin, and I had already read that it was not good to repeat steps, and for this it is necessary to use the keyword "Background", but in the example of this page they are repeating the same "Given" again and again, Could it be that I am doing wrong? I need to know your opinion about it:
Like with several things, this a topic that will generate different opinions. On this particular example I would have moved the "Given that I select the post" to the Background section as this seems to be a pre-requisite to all scenarios on this feature. Of course this would leave the scenarios in the feature without an actual Given section but those would be incorporated from the Background section on execution.
I have also seen cases where sometimes the decision of moving steps to the Background is a trade-off between having more or less feature files and how these are structured. For example, if there are 10 scenarios for a particular feature with a lot of similar steps between them - but there are 1 or 2 scenarios which do not require a particular step, then those 1 or 2 scenarios would have to moved into a new feature file in order to have the exact same steps on the Background section of the original feature.
Of course it is correct to keep the scenarios like this. From a tester's perspective, the Scenarios/Test cases should run independently, therefore, you can keep these tests separately for each functionality.
But in case you are doing an integration testing, then some of these test cases can be merged, thus you can cover multiple test cases in one scenario.
And the "given" statement is repeating, therefore you can put that in the background, so you don't have to call it in each scenarios.
Note: These separate scenarios will be handy when you run the scripts separately with annotation tags, when you just have to check for a specific functionality, or a bug fix.
We are currently in the process of upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS 2012. When TFS 2008 was set up, the people involved didn't understand a lot of what the work item fields were for, and we ended up with very heavily customised templates and in fact lost a lot of default fields. As part of the upgrade to 2012 we are trying to return to the out of the box templates as much as possible to ensure we get to use as many of the features as possible, however there are a small number of custom fields that we need to include for reporting purposes.
Our product development process involves a roadmap for upcoming releases which includes new work as well as bug fixes. When a bug is assigned to be worked on by the developers we would like to be able to choose which release we're targeting the fix for - as far as I can see, Iteration is best suited for this. At the point the bug is closed though, we would also like to track what release it was actually fixed in, since things often get bumped from one release to the next if higher priority bugs or change requests come in, but this is where we come unstuck since I can't seem to assign Iteration to both fields such that the two show different values.
If possible we would prefer not to have global lists that have to be constantly updated with release numbers across our product range (we have around 8 different products which are constantly in development, each with their own release numbers), and leaving one of them as a text field leaves open the possibility that we will get inconsistencies in what people enter, eg 1.01 versus 1.1 which will show up in reporting as 2 different releases. As the fields are just looking up a set of values in the background, is there no way that the iteration list can be used twice? Or does someone have an alternative suggestion as to how we get round this?
What I think I'd suggest in this case is using a COPY rule on a state change event, so that when you move your work item into the Closed state, it would populate your custom field with the value currently in your Iteration field.
This would give you a snapshot of the value at the right point in time which then wouldn't be altered if the iteration was later changed, along with a history entry if it was opened & closed multiple times over its lifetime.
As iteration is time limited and release is perpetual there is an inherent mismatch of purpose with using iteration here. Iteration is for planning.
You would be better creating a release list with the version that you release.
If you are sprinting for example you may not know up front which release you will end up on before you start. If you are not sprinting then you are just kidding yourself that your know.
I've been a JIRA and Bugzilla admin in past jobs, and have quite often had users ask for the ability to have more than one assignee per issue.
I know this is possible in JIRA, but to my mind it never makes sense; an issue should represent a piece of work, and only one person can do a piece of work (at least in software, I've never used an issue tracker for a 2-man bobsled team ;-)) A large piece of work will obviously involve more than one person, but I think in that case it should be split into subtasks to allow for accurate status reporting.
Does anyone have any use cases where it's valid to have multiple assignees ?
The Assignee field means many things to many people. A better name might be "Responsible User". There are three cases I discuss with my clients:
A. number of assignees = 0
JIRA has an Allow Unassigned issues option but I discourage use of that because if a work item isn't owned by anyone it tends to be ignored by everyone.
B. number of assignees = 1
The default case
C. number of assignees > 1
Who is responsible for the work item represented by the issue? The best case I've seen for this is that when an issue can be handled by any one person in a team, so before triage the issue is assigned to everyone in that team. I think a better approach is to create a JIRA user with an email address that sends to the whole team, and assign it to that user. Then a member of the team can have the issue assigned to them in particular.
Changing the one assignee case has the history recorded in the History tab. Nothing is lost in that case.
I'll often have a story / feature that can be split across multiple developers. They will have individually assigned subtasks but it would make sense to assign the parent to all involved, unless there's a lead developer. I wasn't actually aware that I could do multiple assignments, so thanks for the tip!
The other case I can think of is pair programming.
I hit upon this question while looking for solutions to doing this. Since I want to do this, I'm guessing my use case counts as an answer to your question: I only really want one assignee in the sense of someone currently working on a problem, but I want to track the whole lifecycle of an issue. For us, that can mean:
A support person receives a report from a customer, creates an issue
An issue-wrangler reviews the issue to make sure it's valid, not duplicated, has all appropriate details, etc.
A developer implements/fixes the issue
A tester performs whatever tests are appropriate (in our case, mostly extending our automated testsuite to additionally test the feature/fix)
An operations person rolls out the new version to a test environment
A support person informs the customer, who does his own tests with the new version in the test environment
An operations person rolls out the new version to production
Not all issues necessarily go through all steps. Some issues have more steps (e.g. a code review between step 3 and 4). Many issues will also move backwards among the steps (developer needs more information, we go from step 3 to 1 or 2; tester spots a problem, we go from 4 to 3).
At each stage, only one person is actually responsible for whatever's got to be done. Nevertheless, there are a whole bunch of people who are associated with the issue. Tracking systems we've used are happy to offer easy changes to previous owners of the issue (shown as a list), but I'd ideally like to go a step further, with the owner automatically reverting to the correct prior owner depending on the issue's status. At step 6, the original support person from step 1 should ideally contact the customer. At step 7, the ops person from step 5 would ideally be the assignee.
In other words, while I don't want multiple assignees for a given step, I do want there to be a "support assignee", a "developer assignee", a "testing assignee", etc.
We can do this with subtasks and we can do it by manually selecting previous owners when changing statuses, but neither is ideal and I think the situation above is one where multiple assignees would make sense.
In my company, we have a similar workflow to Nikhil. We work in a scrum model, with developers, testers and a technical writer on each team.
The workflow of a development task is
Development -> Developer review -> QA testing -> PO Acceptance -> Done
The workflow of a QA task is
QA writes test case / automated test -> QA review -> Done
We had a tool which JIRA replaced that allowed us to assign multiple people to a task, which we found very useful for our workflow. On a QA task, I could easily see if the other tester on my team had already done work and I needed to do the next step.
Without this, I am finding it difficult to quickly identify tasks written by the other tester on my scrum team which are ready for me to review (versus the ones I wrote which they need to review).
So many people have asked for the ability to have multiple assignees since at least 2007. They have varying, valid use cases. I was disappointed that the JIRA development team unilaterally said they won't implement this and would ask them to reconsider.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-12841
While pair-group working (pair programming etc..) it would be nice to assign both persons to the issue.
Tasks move through different steps through development (example: Development, review, testing). Different persons can be responsible for each step. Even though the task may be in review or testing, the reviewer will have stuff fore the developer to fix. Having different roles to assign to would help organizing the work.
In our team we usually develop 1 or 2 persons together.
Then the code is reviewed by around 2-5 persons in individually or in pairs
Then it is tested by 1-2 persons initially, finally tested by the whole team.
Currently our system allows us to assign a single person at a given time. That limits our ability to follow who is working on what without looking through the log for the issue. The benifits of beeing able to assign multiple persons would be good for us.
What happens if John is assigned a task and cannot finish it, and it is moved to Jane's list because John was a slacker?
Are you OK with losing history of who it was originally assigned to, and the hours that were spent / billed on it?
In an e-Learning scenario, it makes sense to have an issue assigned to multiple users.
Here is what I want to do:
I have a storyboard which I want to assign to 3 people at the same time - the animators, the recording artists and the graphic designers. Once these people finish their tasks, they will pass it on to a common reviewer, who will review and close the issue.
Graphically it would look something like this:
Storyboard
/ | \
graphics animator recording
\ | /
reviewer
|
done
The three job roles depend only on one storyboard. The compilation of the three have to go to a reviewer. I'm racking my brains to get this working on redmine. Haven't found a solution yet.
Got this answer from an Atlassian partner https://www.isostech.com/solutions/
and then later from Atlassian
Objective:
Want to set who does the works for each step on an issue
Summary:
Use a plugin to copy values from custom fields into the assignee field whenever the issue transitions to a new step.
How:
1. Install the Suite Utilities plug-in:
This plug-in adds a bunch of new functionalities to workflows.
You will use the plug-in to copy the value of a custom field to the assignee:
Create a custom field as single user picker for each role i.e., dev, tester, reviewer to be assigned at different steps in the issue
Add these fields to the issue type's screen
Modify the post-function on the workflow transition between each step
Add a "Copy Value From Other Field" post function and set it to copy the value from the appropriate user custom field into the assignee field.
On a particular project we're working with a total of 10 team members.
After about a year working on the project (and using Mantis as a bug-/feature-tracker eversince), the bugtracker gets more and more difficult to use, as no standard has been setup that explains how to create new tasks, how to comment tasks etc. This leads to multiple entries for the same bugs, inability to easily find bugs when searching for them etc.
How do you organize your bugtracker? Do you use a lot of (sub)categories for different portions of your application (GUI, Backend etc), do you use tags in the title of tasks (i.e. "[GUI][OptionPage] The error")?
Is anyone in your team allowed to introduce new tasks or is this step channeled through a single "Mantis-master" (who would then know whether a new report is a duplicate or an entirely new entry)?
Always link a version control system commit to an issue and back so that you know which commits were made do solve which issue and why a certain commit was done.
What we did is to introduce a role for approve entries to the bug tracker. This role can be shared by different people. The process is either to approve, to approve with a small edit, or to reject the entry with the request for further editing or clarification.
It is better for the general understanding if the role is not given to people working in the (core) team.
In a "large" mantis system on the open web, I've seen the rules go something like
New: Anyone can enter a bug.
Acknowledged: A select few people can upgrade it to this level. These people have seen every new bug for a while, and thus they'll know if it's a duplicate. Or they can pass it back to the reporter for clarification until they understand it well enough to do this job.
Confirmed: Set by decision makers who basically say "We will be doing this".
I don't actually remember where it was, and more importantly I don't know how well it worked.