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Split a Task into Sub Tasks

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Raoul Jacobs
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Raoul Jacobs asked on 05 Aug 2011, 01:26 PM
Hi,

I have another suggestion.
As you know a story is basically split down in major tasks which then can be planned and assigned to team members.
Now whenever I receive such a Task i have the tendency as a developer to split this Task into Sub Taks.
This Sub Tasks can be described as small units of work. This Sub Tasks can than be considered as check-ins.
So in the future whenever you check in you can link it to the related Sub Task and thus can be set partial completed or completed.
Apart from that can the sub tasks also get re-assigned to another Team Member since it's more related to his experience (e.g. Senior Developer, Decision Maker,...)
At Sub Tasks level we should also be able set a status of progress
E.g Initial, a x% ,Completed and Blocked (means you cannot solve it at this time because a dependency is not ready or your not 100% familiar with the solution and need help)

Summary:
So Sub Tasks are basically little units of work which are mainly created by the assigned developer.
They should have some status indication.
You should be able to link them with a check-in.
You should be able to link them to another Task or Sub Task (dependency)
You should be able to re-assign them to another Team Member

Kind regards

Raoul

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Ryan
Telerik team
answered on 09 Aug 2011, 08:44 PM
Hi Raoul Jacobs,

In TeamPulse we have specifically made Tasks the smallest unit of work. If you are finding the need to break Tasks down into smaller entities, a better course of action might be to adjust your stories. Odds are your stories are too large and not decomposed enough. TeamPulse does support the ability to create Story Hierarchy such as parent stories (or Epics) and child stories. Another solution may be to simply create more tasks on the story. Do these workarounds help with your scenario?

Best wishes,
Ryan
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Raoul Jacobs
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answered on 09 Aug 2011, 09:02 PM
Hi Ryan,

Not really.
There is a big difference between tasks created by an architect and a developer.
The Tasks of an architect are most of the time more general.
e.g very short story: a user shoud be able to subscribe to a newsletter, a user can already leave some credentials, just the tickbox is missing for the newsletter.
This would then be split in the following tasks:
1) add new field to the database
2) add the field to the views for identity subscription

Let us say these tasks are all assigned to me then I might split them in the following sub tasks :
1) add new field to the database
    a) add boolean not nullable
    b) update EF model
    c) add display attribute linked to resource file for localization
2) add the field to the views for identity subscription
    a) add checkbox to the view for identity>create 
    b) add checkbox to the view identity>edit
    c) make sure value of the checkbox is persisted to the model for identity>create
    d) make sure value of the checkbox is persisted to the model for identity>edit

In our company some tasks are to be assigned to specific people e.g. create field on database can only be done by dba

Kind Regards

Raoul

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Ryan
Telerik team
answered on 09 Aug 2011, 09:28 PM
Hello Raoul Jacobs,

I do see what you are saying. We deal with these sort of task break downs in a couple of ways. We either add a description to a task where we lay out the steps involved in that Task, or we create more Tasks on the Story. Usually the creation of additional Tasks relies on the very situation you highlight, if the Task must or can be done by a different person.

We find this works pretty well for us, and we can get by without the additional hierarchy of Sub-Tasks. Where do you see the value of a Sub-Task over just having another Task under the Story? 

All the best,
Ryan
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Raoul Jacobs
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answered on 09 Aug 2011, 09:42 PM
Hi Ryan,

I see what you mean.

The value of having sub tasks are the following:
- better indication of the progress on a task
- you can put a flag on sub tasks where you indicate you got stuck and thus need help
- re-assign a sub task to another team member
- checkins. it would be very neat that every checkin represents a task. now with this smaller units of work we can almost guarantee that 1 checkin = 1 sub task.

Kind Regards

Raoul
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Steve
Telerik team
answered on 09 Aug 2011, 10:03 PM
Hello Raoul,

I'm the TeamPulse Product Owner and I've been watching this thread with interest. I'm always looking for areas where our product could be improved and I want to better understand how people are using the product.

For your case, could you just replace your parent task with smaller tasks?

This
Parent Task 1
Sub Task 1.1
Sub Task 1.2
Parent Task 2
Sub Task 2.1
Sub Task 2.2

Would become this
Task 1.1
Task 1.2
Task 2.1
Task 2.2

You would lost some context, but you'd get all the benefits you listed.

I'm not trying to make excuses for a deficiency in out product, but I'm just trying to see if we can give you a plausible workaround until we catch up to your needs.

Best wishes,
Steve
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Raoul Jacobs
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answered on 09 Aug 2011, 10:26 PM
Hi Steve,

This is of coarse an option to solve this problem for now :-)
As you mentioned we would loose some context since there is no grouping(task) of tasks (sub tasks).
What i'm afraid off is that by splitting the tasks like that, that the context will be copied in some way.

e.g.
1.1 add fields to the DB > boolean not nullable
2.1 update EF model > Identity
2.2 update EF model > localize display attribute on Identity Class

To give you an idea.
I think we as developers always try to group things one way or another to keep track of the context :-)

Kind Regards

Raoul

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Ryan
Telerik team
answered on 10 Aug 2011, 05:37 PM
Hi Raoul Jacobs,

Thanks for all the great feedback. We love getting it and will consider it when planning future releases.

Greetings,
Ryan
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Walter
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answered on 20 Oct 2011, 03:33 PM
Hello,

I also vote for the "sub task" feature. Attitionally it would be gread if the task description field would allow entries in richt text format. Please let me know if you plan to implement such a feature.

Thank you
Daniel Koffler
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David Harris
Telerik team
answered on 20 Oct 2011, 08:58 PM
Hi Daniel,

Thank you again for your feedback on these suggestions.

Best wishes,
David Harris
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Walter
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answered on 22 Dec 2011, 08:13 PM
Hello,

any new regarding this feature request?

Thank you
Daniel
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Kamen Ivanov
Telerik team
answered on 27 Dec 2011, 03:54 PM
Hello Daniel,

 For our next release we started with tasks improvements. The first thing we did was enabling tasks to be reordered so you will be able to choose the order that they should be worked on. I cannot confirm that we will manage to implement all the feature requests but we are working in that direction.

Regards,
Kamen Ivanov
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Raoul Jacobs
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Ryan
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Raoul Jacobs
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Steve
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Walter
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David Harris
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Kamen Ivanov
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