Visibility of subtasks
I pretty much love YouTrack. It's a huge step up from JIRA.
There is only really one thing I dislike about it. The whole point of Kanban is we all should live on the board(s). So I want to be able to glance at the board and see what the hell is going on at all times. Furthermore, if I do drill down on something, I want to get a quick sense of what is going on with that ticket. YouTrack is very clumsy in this way. If you were to never nest anything, YT would be ideal, but of course we know that is completely ludicrous.
Worst of all though is that nesting leads to a whole hellfire of other issues. Deeply nested stories pretty quickly make the system unusable: actually, never mind the word deeply. Even something like this:
epic
story
task
makes the system pretty useless. Say this epic was in the backlog and you just wanted to work on the task. What happens when you assign that and set it to a board and then set the status to In Progress? The whole furball gets dragged out and you can't really see why, unless you go on an archeological expedition.
Finally, the depiction of related items is really wanting. Every time I go into a ticket that has sub items, I have to open that stupid view? Really? And even if I do, I don't really get to see what is going on with it, again I have to investigate.
I hate to sound like Debbie Downer here but these issues are serious enough to be undo a lot of the positive work that has been done. The best thing about YT is that you really can stay on the board 80% of the time. But until these issues are resolved, the required departures will undo the convenience gained.
There is only really one thing I dislike about it. The whole point of Kanban is we all should live on the board(s). So I want to be able to glance at the board and see what the hell is going on at all times. Furthermore, if I do drill down on something, I want to get a quick sense of what is going on with that ticket. YouTrack is very clumsy in this way. If you were to never nest anything, YT would be ideal, but of course we know that is completely ludicrous.
Worst of all though is that nesting leads to a whole hellfire of other issues. Deeply nested stories pretty quickly make the system unusable: actually, never mind the word deeply. Even something like this:
epic
story
task
makes the system pretty useless. Say this epic was in the backlog and you just wanted to work on the task. What happens when you assign that and set it to a board and then set the status to In Progress? The whole furball gets dragged out and you can't really see why, unless you go on an archeological expedition.
Finally, the depiction of related items is really wanting. Every time I go into a ticket that has sub items, I have to open that stupid view? Really? And even if I do, I don't really get to see what is going on with it, again I have to investigate.
I hate to sound like Debbie Downer here but these issues are serious enough to be undo a lot of the positive work that has been done. The best thing about YT is that you really can stay on the board 80% of the time. But until these issues are resolved, the required departures will undo the convenience gained.
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Thank you for your feedback and sorry for not responding earlier!
Ok, pretty interesting thing about taking task from the backlog. We've, surely, done this hierarchical view times ago to make the process more evident. When move subtask to the board, then someone probably ask you where this task came from? With this view it looks like I know from where things come from, don't you think so?
As for showing relations, subtasks (I mean relation, the fact this is subtask of some parent task) are visible when switch to 'With description' view on a board. If you mean this view, looks like there should a way to switch to different views- with description, minimal one, etc. Always showing details on a board can make the board overloaded.
Just thought, how best describe the process working with Agile boards, creating intelligent hierarchy, working with several boards at a time and realize the best way is to refer to our awesome guides:
http://blog.jetbrains.com/youtrack/2014/03/multi-level-agile-boards-or-how-we-support-epics/
http://blog.jetbrains.com/youtrack/2014/04/cross-project-agile-boards-in-youtrack-the-best-recipes/
One of them is probably known for you from our twitter thread.
Thank you.
I agree that I don't want a crowded board, but we are doing continuous delivery now, not mindless iterations with 50 stories grinding on for 3 weeks. We make a board per release (another feature I'd like to see: better CD support). So we are keeping the board not too crowded.
I think I was not clear enough: if you nest stories and epics, then the epic, by definition is going to be on the board for the duration of all work on it right? You don't see the pointlessness in that?
I did see those blog posts and think they are very useful, thanks. I will try the 2 boards approach, but the main thing we are doing now with Lean + CD is making the board the definitive picture of what's going on. Two boards is less definitive. :)