Multidisciplinary teams, estimates and Rapid boards

Marc Williamson August 2, 2012

Hi All,

Been using Greenhopper quite a bit over the last year, using the standard Planning, Task and Chart views.

We have a multidisciplinary team of Programmers, Designers and Artists and on each project there are varying amounts of each.

The stand views allow me to create ART, CODE, DESIGN components and Subtasks which are visually different, to help communicate what needs to be done. The Filters work pretty well for Reports for how much work is planned in each sprint. ie Code filter allows me to see that we have 4 weeks of code time scheduled this sprint, the Art see that we have 2 weeks of Art time scheduled. For two coders and an artist that’s what we need.

My question is down to the use of rapid boards, recently gone back to look at these and I can see the benefits of task management and rapidly creating sprints. The downside is that the Sprint box will only show Time estimates for the whole story. It doesn’t really have the flexibility to plan Code and Artist together.

How do you manage multidisciplinary teams and their estimates?

Marc

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sclowes
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August 5, 2012

Hi Marc,

I'm not sure I understand your current set up. How exactly are you storing the separate estimates for Art/Code/Design? Is each story/task owned by just one of Art/Code/Design?

Maybe some screenshots or some further discussion would help.

Thanks,
Shaun

Marc Williamson August 5, 2012

Hi Shaun,

We attually have set up an ART DESIGN and CODE component. Tasks, substasks and stories are assigned a component. Users can search for comonents and its easy to set up filters for these. (it would be idea to be able to assign more than one component in greenhopper BTW)

I read my last post and there are some pretty nasty english in there sorry about that.

A typical simple story might be:

Story - Friends Social Screen - Componet: ALL

Subtask - Design userflow to social screen - Component: Design - Estimate 0.5d

Subtask - Information design for Socail Screen - Component :Design - Estimate 0.5d

Subtask - Social screen mock up - Component: Art - Estimate 1d

Subtask - Display social screen - Component: Code - Estimate 2d

So we can see that this story requires 1d of Design, 1d of Art and 2d of code.

In the standard agile views I can use filters to show these and work out how much we should be able to get done based on availiblity of the team. Tasks are assigned automaticly but any member of the code , art or design team can take the task and assign them to themselves.

With rapid boards it only show thetime we assign to the story, not the value of all subtasks. The only way I can think of it workign would be to create a Story PER componet so:

Story - Friends Social Screen - Componet: Design

Subtask - Design userflow to social screen - Component: Design - Estimate 0.5d

Subtask - Information design for Socail Screen - Component :Design - Estimate 0.5d

Story - Friends Social Screen - Componet: ART

Subtask - Social screen mock up - Component: Art - Estimate 1d

Story - Friends Social Screen - Componet: CODE

Subtask - Social screen mock up - Component: Art - Estimate 1d

Subtask - Display social screen - Component: Code - Estimate 2d

Any other ideas?

Marc

sclowes
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August 6, 2012

That's an interesting use case. You're right that currently your best option would be to have a story per component.

In the future we plan to show the Remaining Estimate in the sprint marker so that could help here.

Thanks,
Shaun

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