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.
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.
Our evolution of using DevOps is continuing (slowly but surely). One thing we've noticed is that some people are trying to but excessive estimates in for their time, but what we really want to be encouraging is for people to be breaking work down into multiple tasks.
Is there a way that we can set our DevOps work items to only accept a maximum value? I've had a look at the 'rules' and there doesn't seem to be anything there to let us do this, and because it's an out of the box field I don't think we can put a value limit against it.
I suppose what I want to understand is whether it would be possible to do this in some way? Could I do something with the existing 'Original Estimate' field or would I have to create a new custom field to have any chance of preventing people from putting in 100 hours for something that's actually more like 2?
If you are also using Boards, you could highlight work items where the original estimate is higher than a certain value. This would not prevent setting these values, but rather encourage the users to put in lower values.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/boards/customize-cards?view=azure-devops
Beware that this might not really help the underlying issue: People must be convinced of the benefits of splitting up tasks, otherwise they will just work around the tooling. Like always putting in the maximum value or not putting in the actual work hours.
Is there a way that we can set our DevOps work items to only accept a
maximum value?
I am afraid that setting the value limit for the Original Estimates field is currently not supported.
As workaround, you could need to create a custom field of type Picklist, and then specify the available values in the picklist.
You could add your request for this feature on our UserVoice site , which is our main forum for product suggestions.After suggest raised, you can vote and add your comments for this feedback. The product team would provide the updates if they view it.
As of late, I have encountered a problem with my view index being rebuilt all the time and users are having massive issues with this particular view.
I figured it was due to #Date in my selection formula aswell as one of my column formulas. This way the selection formula would be different every second that passes.
So I figured, since I dont need hours/minutes/seconds in my formulas, I would use #Today. This worked out well for 2-3 days and after that the same problem occured again.
So since the problem is back again, I'm not quite sure if that even causes the problem. When this particular view is open, I have issues in every tab that's open in notes, not only this specific database.
Is this a common/known issue? What can I do to avoid this problem?
Yes, it's a common issue that has been well known since the very early days of Notes more than 20 years ago.
#Date is not a problem on its own. #Now and #Today are both problems.
Using #TextToTime("Today") was a popular workaround that was discovered early on. This hid the problem from the indexer so the server failed to realize that the view was out of date. It doesn't solve the underlying problem, though, which is that the view is trying to do something that views simply aren't designed to do. Views are intended to be static, requiring update only when documents change. Introducing time into a selection or column formula makes them dynamic, which kills that presumption and is a major source of performance problems. Using this workaround requires that the view be fully rebuilt every night. You can do that by setting the view index options to "Manual", and setting up a program document to run an updall command with the -T option for the specific database and view once per night. Note that if your users are spread out across timezones, you'll have to pick one specific time as your standard, and if you have servers spread out across timezones you're going to have a lot of fun figuring out how to make them all show the same documents in the view at all times - but that's common to pretty much all approaches to the problem.
See this IBM Technote for a description of several other options that people have used over the years, with their pros and cons. Also see this article by Andre Guirard, which covers date/time issues in great detail.
I would add that the agent-and-folder solution that they describe in the Technote was generally my preferred approach, but it does have an additional disadvantage that they don't mention: it can eventually lead to an obscure situation where the server throws an error "Folder is larger than supported". This error actually has nothing to do with the size of the folder in documents; it refers to fragmentation of internal structures that occurs as large numbers of documents are moved in and out of the folder over time. It could only be fixed by deleting and re-creating the folder, which you can do in your agent code. I believe this problem may be fixed in more recent versions of Domino, but it caused me a lot of grief back in the Notes 6 and 7 timeframes.
Yet another weird story from Domino Designer 9.0.1:
The application in question is set to support German and English; German is set to be both the source and the default langauge.
Over the course of the past few weeks we observed that there are some CustomControls and Xpages whose properties files are multiplying; within something like 12 hours we often see hundreds of multiplied files (currently we have 120 multiplications; earlier this week we had a case with > 1000 multiplied propertiey files!) In package explorer they turn up like this:
As you can see there is something like a docUnid added to the property's file name. Apart from a different time stamp they all are identical internally. In same cases both language versions are multiplied, in this particular case here only the German (= source) version shows that phenomenon.
Another strange fact: this particular custom control hasn't changed for quite a while, and it only contains a single control with a static text attribute, alongside a
Anyone having an idea what could be causing this, and what possible solutions I could try?
Tech facts and some more observations:
Domino Designer 9.0.1 FP6, ExtLib 17; we are working in a team where each one of us is coding in their own local replica, then replicating into the "hub" replica. I can't prove it but I assume that there is a connection between one of us replicating updates and the creation of new prüperty duplicates
EDIT: some more observations: I think I was able to pin it down to the replication between two specific machines; I just ran a sequence of 5 or 6 manually driven replications between both instances, every time without making any changes to the design code on either side. nevertheless every replication reported exactly 1 update and 1 addition, and each time a new property file was added.
So meanwhile I deleted the custom control in question and rebuilt it from scratch under a slightly different name (just to be on the safe side). For now it seems that the application is "behaving" now but I'm sort of sure that this will return sooner or later.
Speak after me: source control and replication do not match.
More details:
The property files get stored as attachments in a design note. That's usually the note with the form. Unless you switch on multi lingual, then each property gets its own note. When different people work on the database these note elements get recreated on build getting the next UNID kind of.
So the right flow for what you try to do: pick your best version of the nsf. Nuke the other replicas. Bind it to version control. Let your peer developer create an nsf from that repository. Sync of design shall only happen via that repository.
While your on it: add Bavarian as language, so your Munich customers can use the app too
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.