We’re working the front end UI in-earnest soon. In preparation, I’m writing down questions I might implicitly ask of this tool at different moments if I were a potential user. Here’s a first pass at my notes on this.
What questions would you like the interface to answer somehow? What would you rather ask your teammates directly?
This looks very comprehensive. For an individual story I would ask "who needs to review/accept this?"
As a PM, I think questions like who hasn't picked up a story, who is pairing - relating to how engineers are managing their own work – are less important to me personally. I think most of these things would be valuable to chat about with the team directly, but it's also useful to have in a UI so that disruption can be minimized and conversations can be focused on the bigger and more important things.
For StoryView - I don't think I see "what commits contributed to this story?" and "Who committed them?"
For Backlog View I worry that "who is pairing on this?" might limit adoption among less-than-pairing teams. Not sure if you care about that now.
From the POV of using a backlog as a source of truth:
Yeah, I've seen teams sort of shrug in the direction of the entire "decision record" practice discussion (and to some extent conventional commits, etc) because well-formed stories linked to commits often satisfy these sufficiently.
But especially the last one I've only seen explicitly and consistently when I was doing exploratory charters and, in the expedition report, describing decision points and followups, and carefully cross-linking stories - which in tracker wasn't terribly onerous but was fiddly and difficult enough that even my own performance at it was inconsistent over time.
I really want a tool that has natural affordances for the relationships between stories that go beyond manual cross-linking and chaotic (or highly discipline-dependent) tagging.
Of course. We're making this a first-class pairing enabler, but not punishing solo artists for picking up something. We want to embrace the remote/a-sync AND the colocated/synchronous styles simultaneously.
