Bugs vs Stories

[Stuart Hemming]

I'm looking for a bit of advice on managing bugs.

ATM, we're treating Bugs as items at the same level as Stories. That is, we assign tasks (in TFS) to both Bugs and Stories.

This works fine for us but there is never any visibility on the Dashboard for bugs. For example, for this sprint I have 4 bugs and 4 Stories assigned to me but there's no visibility at all of the bugs.

I know that tasks that are children of bugs isn't something that TeamPulse knows about (a major failing in my book) but surely the bugs should be on my taskboard.

Or have we completely misunderstood how this is supposed to work?

--
Stuart

[Elena Hristova]

Hello Stuart,

  We are aware that managing bugs has to be improved and there are some feature requests logged in our local TeamPulse instance along with stories in our backlog. I will add votes for you for "Add bugs to the story and task boards" and "Add ability to assign tasks to bugs".

 For the current situation I would suggest you to create story (one or more) when  planning the iteration and assign planned bugs to it. This way you will be able to track on the Story and Task board how many bugs are to be completed till the end of the iteration. Do you think that this approach could be useful in your case?

Greetings,
Elena Peneva
the Telerik team

[Rodolphe]

Hi Elena,

Could you also add a vote for me on these features ? 
Displaying Bugs in the task board is a must have feature for my team. We used it in your WIM, and I must say that we are lost without it. Do you have any idea if this feature is planned in a near future ?

For the moment we are going to create a "bug" story per sprint and assign it bugs but it is a very rough way to manage our backlog as we cannot easily track the sprint evolution.

Rodolphe

[Elena Hristova]

Hi Rodolphe,

 For our next release - 2012 R2 we are going to include adding tasks to bugs, issues and risks as well as displaying those tasks and their parents on the taskboard. 

 Currently it is not clear weather showing bugs on the storyboard will be included in the release or not. However, I will add another vote for you and hopefully this functionality will soon be implemented.

Kind regards,
Elena Peneva
the Telerik team

[Shawn Krivjansky]

Currently using 2012.2.406

I see Bugs ARE now included on the Story Board.  That is great.

I do NOT believe ISSUEs (work item) are included on the Story Board yet correct?

If not, when can we have these on the Story Board??  will they be in the upcoming release?  It's the same thing for those as it was for bugs... no visibility.

[Lora Borisova]

Hi Shawn Krivjansky,

Thank you for your interest in TeamPulse.

In TeamPulse 2012.2.406 version we have provided functionality for direct creation and representation of story, bug, issue and risk on both, Story Board and Task Board as well as a way for direct task creation from inside the Task Board for all these work item types. You can find more details about this functionality on both links below:

http://www.telerik.com/agile-project-management-tools/support-resources/documentation/user-guide/features/tracking/story-board.aspx

http://www.telerik.com/agile-project-management-tools/support-resources/documentation/user-guide/features/tracking/task-board.aspx

One possible reason for not seeing Issues and Risks is the difference in the statuses they have and those actually represented on the two boards. For example in TeamPulse template on Story Board you have 4 status groups as follows: Not Done, In Progress, Ready For Test and Done while the Issue and Risk have statuses "Active" and "Closed".

In order to see those work items displayed on the Story Boards you should add these statuses in the Edit Advanced Settings xml file (Settings -> Project Settings), use user with "Edit Project Settings" rights. From there add in the xml the statuses similar to the ones below (notice Active and Closed ones):

<StoryBoardStatusList>
  <string>Not Done</string>
  <string>Active</string>
  <string>In Progress</string>
  <string>Ready For Test</string>
  <string>Closed</string>
  <string>Done</string>
</StoryBoardStatusList>

After that it should be possible for you to see issues and risks on Story Board in the respective columns.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us again.

Regards,
Lora Borisova
the Telerik team