[teampractices] Phabricator terminology change (blocking->subtasks)

Fri Jul 1 17:39:01 UTC 2016

I know my teams would love to distinguish between subtasks (of tasks with
story points) and children (of epics). I don't think that is possible right
now, so they often use the title prefix "[Subtask]".

On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 10:25 AM, Joel Aufrecht <jaufrecht at wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> Should we make (or find and join) a request that they provide a way to
> differentiate between the two cases?  Possible uses:
>
> different display in the UI
> use in data analysis, e.g., summing up tasks by summing up their subtasks
> (and not dependencies)
>
>
>
> *-- Joel Aufrecht*
> Team Practices Group
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 9:56 AM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> This week, phabricator changed the terminology it uses for managing
>> dependencies between tasks. What has been called "Blocking"/"Blocked by" is
>> now called "Parent"/"Subtask". Ignoring phab terminology for a minute, here
>> are the two basic cases these terms are covering:
>>
>> 1. *Sequential dependencies.* For example, if "Implement feature X"
>> needed to be complete before "Document feature X", then the implementation
>> task would Block the document task, and the document task would be blocked
>> by the implement task.
>>
>> 2. *Composition relationships/task breakdown.* For example, if "deploy
>> feature X" consisted of "implement feature X" and "document feature X",
>> then the deploy task might be a parent, while the implement and document
>> tasks would be subtasks.
>>
>> Until recently, phab has used the blocking/blocked by term to cover both
>> cases. A parent task would be blocked by its subtasks. There was a command
>> to create a subtask, which would create the appropriate blocking
>> relationships.
>>
>> Now, phab uses the parent/subtask terminology to cover both cases. In the
>> sequential tasks case, the endpoint would be considered the parent, so in
>> the example above, "document" would be the parent, and "implement" would be
>> its subtask. Note that a task may have multiple "parents".
>>
>> A nice feature they added is the ability to manage the parent/subtask
>> relationship from either end. While editing a task, you can change its
>> subtasks or its parents. Previously, you could only edit one direction.
>>
>> I created T139181 as a task to update our wiki phab documentation.
>>
>> Kevin Smith
>> Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>>
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>>
>
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