Olga Kouzina believes that the use of agile project management tools needs to follow three principles: process first, tools second; development process needs to be reusable; correct practices need to be replicable . Because people often overlook some key elements of the development process when choosing or using agile project management tools, he focuses on the "process" mentioned in the first principle, in order to help everyone understand the development process. a more complete understanding.
First, we can try to break down the existing development process into 3 parts:
The framework in the figure above covers almost three key elements in the development process: work, people, and plans, and they are all elements that are constantly reused in agile development management tools. Let's take a closer look at what these three elements are worth paying attention to.
Element 1: Work is mainly a "what" question, involving features, user stories, tasks, bugs, etc.
- Which work item are you using? How is work broken down in the development process? How many levels are required for work items? Below, we can look at an example to understand the hierarchy: Idea (Problem) → Epic → Product → Project → Feature → User Story → Task.
- What dependencies are required between work items? Besides hierarchical decomposition, do we need to reuse other dependencies in the management tool?
- How do you define that a project or work item is over? Do we need to specify a scope of completion, or tie the project to a time? Do we need to have multiple final states for work items (eg Completed, Resolved?)
Element 2: People are mainly a question of "who" (role), involving development teams, product owners, project managers, users, etc.
- How are team members managed? Do team functions intersect? Is it a functional team, a project team, a department, or no team at all?
- Is the development process the same for every team? Do we place several teams into "Epic" or "User Story" tiers when necessary?
- Do "chicken" group roles that are not part of a development team or project also need to know about workflows? Such as customers, managers?
Element 3: Planning time issues, involving releases and iterations.
- 我们如何进行backlog管理？backlog项都来自哪里？我们应如何整理backlog？
- 项目/发布/迭代：我们是否有交叉项目（或交叉团队）的发布？是否有并行迭代或发布？我们是否将项目分解为多个阶段执行了呢（如UX、原型、功能设计）？
- 我们在使用哪个报告？这个非常重要。一定要检查工具是否具备了我们所需的全部报告？
可能上面没有举出所有需要注意的问题，但这里提供的3个关键要素（工作、人、计划）可以帮助我们在选择或使用敏捷开发管理工具时更加全面地把握开发流程，不致于只根据部分要素就做出选择。