We’re looking at tools to help manage agile projects. This is a large, globally distributed enterprise, and that’s not going to change, so I suppose some sort of expensive tool is a necessary evil.
Many people are involved with reviewing the tools (which include things like Mingle, ScrumWorks, Agile on Demand, VersionOne, and eXPlainPMT). Everyone comes from a different perspective, of course, and I have nothing against how other people choose to work. But one request keeps coming up that bugs me: the insistence that the tool support the ability to do task tracking.
The desire to manage tasks in an agile process is evidence that a team is not collaborating. They are instead using silo-mode development: 1 story -> 1 developer. In lieu of tracking progress by marking off completed stories, they look at progress in terms of what tasks have been completed. May as well go back to waterfall.
It’s all about delivering the story. If you work in a collaborative mode that promotes this, there’s no need for tracking at the task level. (I’m not even going to mention the ludicrous idea that tasks ever outlive an iteration.)
Comments
Anonymous October 7, 2008 at 07:07pm
couldn’t agree with you more. We use scrumworks and you assign a point person to a story/pbi. Then you add or delete tasks as needed.
we went to a csm class with danube too. the trainer said “are you in the business of keeping people busy or producing product?” I think this is the point of your blog postings.
Anonymous October 7, 2008 at 08:51pm
definitely agree.
Our VersionOne tool met both requirements for us. We could start with task tracking if absolutely necessary and turn off at any point in the future with the click of a single check box. We actually started with task tracking turned off and never looked back.
Michael Dubakov October 8, 2008 at 04:02am
I don’t agree that task tracking is an evil. For example, we at TargetProcess use tasks as Definition of Done. We have tasks for each user story like Implementation, Create Acceptance Tests, Testing, Code Review, etc.
Definitely tool should make it possible to disable task tracking, but it brings value as well.
Note that I didn’t say “task tracking was evil.” It’s one way of working, and if it works for you, go for it. However, the better way is to structure things so task tracking becomes irrelevant. If you feel like you have to track tasks, your stories are probably taking too long to complete within the iteration. Spread-out tasks are also a violation of lean principles.
Kevin E. Schlabach October 8, 2008 at 08:25am
I believe it is okay to make task tracking a requirement for tool selection since it is useful. I also understand where you are coming from that if the whole culture “requires” it, there might be a problem. We use VersionOne because it handles both. We use task tracking heavily.
As we work towards appropriately sized stories, we may need this less… but for now it helps us compensate for some other issues.
