[teampractices] Duplication of information in Phabricator workboards?

Wed Feb 11 03:17:05 UTC 2015

On 02/10/2015 03:03 PM, Arthur Richards wrote:
> One of the main problems I've encountered with Phabricator workboards
> is the duplication of information. Most workboard have the following
> columns-
>
>   1. Backlog
>   2. In Dev
>   3. Needs Review
>   4. Done
>
> If we follow the conventions that have been suggested, people only
> assign tasks to themselves when they are ready to work on it, making
> [2] redundant. The #Patch-for-Review tag makes [3] redundant and
> closing tasks makes [4] redundant.

Workboards are partly a visual thing so you can easily see the state of 
the sprint (or overall backlog).

Re #2, most of the time that's true (if it were always true, an 
auto-transition would be useful).  However, sometimes people are 
specially assigned to things before they're about to start, for whatever 
reason (e.g. they're the best person to work on it).

Re #3, this is definitely true.  The best solution would probably be for 
#Patch-for-Review to auto-transition from In Dev to Needs Review.

I completely agree that Done is not necessary.

Done is mainly useful for seeing what you've accomplished in a sprint. 
However, if you create a new board for each sprint (as we will be doing 
in the Collaboration team), you can simply filter the board to show all 
Resolved tasks to see what part of the sprint commitment was accomplished.

> Am I using workboards incorrectly. Is there something I am missing?

There are other possible columns.  Some the Collaboration team currently 
uses:

Sprint board:
---
Product Review - Not all teams have this, so it can not be a status. 
This basically means it's a user-facing feature that our PM wants to 
test before marking Done.

Scrum-of-scrums interdependencies
---

Backlog board:
---
Ready for next sprint
Story grooming/estimation
Design / Requirements
Backlog (default column)
---

We'll continue to refine it, but this shows some ways workboards can be 
used non-redundantly.

P.S. I'm interested in what you said about dashboards ("I really like 
that Phabricator lets you put different kinds of queries in multiple 
columns on your dashboard").  Are these linkable?  If so, it would be 
great to have an example.

Matt Flaschen