When a team member changes the state of task to "In Progress" it would be nice if the state of the backlog item could automatically change state to "In Progress".
The team members are focused about the tasks on their My Work page but frequently forget to update the backlog item status.
This functionality would help to keep the virtual story board in sync with reality and save the team members from having to update the backlog item status.
Currently backlog item status must be updated independently of task status.
by: Philip W. | over a year ago | Tracking
Comments
add this to the transitions functionality?
Additionally, if someone enters hours against a task, the task status could automatically change to "In Progress".
Seperate idea about automatically moving tasks is here (https://ideaspace.versionone.com/default/Idea/Detail/518), and could be implemented seperately. Thanks for the votes!
Exactly what I'm missing: When any Team Member sets the first Task of a Story to "In Progress" I'd like to chnage the Story automagically to "In Progress", when it's not already. My Team Members usually forget that and I don't like to adjust the Storyboard all the time ...
+1 Chelsea C.
+1 Thomas V.
this is something that every user in our organization asks for
Rally does this. This is so inconvenient I may not move forward with VersionOne - I'm surprised this idea has been around for 2 years and not done. Very cumbersome.
Seriously 2 years to fix this?!?! This should be nearly trivial to do. When task moves to "In Progress" set parent backlog item to "In Progress". It's clean simple and obvious.
It's probably not quite as trivial as that because task and story statuses are user configurable. However, I agree that this should have happened already. One of the biggest issues we have with VersionOne is the lack of consistency in the states of various items. This creates many reporting headaches and is something that should be automated.
Also how about a task that is moved to Blocked? It should move the Story to Blocked as well?!
Vote for this
This makes me feel as though I'm working for this tool.
Please give us an update on why this isn't being worked on, many thanks...
As a new user I was really surprised to discover that this is not the default behaviour.
I've been running projects in VersionOne for a few years and would like to see this feature too. I'm constantly reminding new team members to keep story status in sync with the tasks beneath it. It would be nice to define syncronization points in VersionOne admin. (When first/last task moves from status a to status b, move story from status c to status d.) As for default behavior, in addition to moving a story to "In Progress" when the first task is moved. Change the status to "Done" when the last task is moved to "awaiting review." It might also be nice if the team member that changes the status of a story or task is automatically signed up for it. Of course, this behavior should be configurable by the project admin.
I would expect this to work out of the box as it seems such basic functionality. Stories break down into tasks, when you move a task to "in progress" the related stories should also be updated to reflect the same status.
It would really help with compliance if there were less clicks to get everything done. With higher compliance, would have the added benefit of everyone in the organization having no doubt as to an item's status.
I aggree, less clicks, time saving,.. have the tools do the work..
I'ts been several years of nothing. Obviously they don't pay much attention to IdeaSpace. I recommend sending your request to support@versionone.com if you really want to see this feature. That's a much better channel of communication with the company.
This is one of my biggest annoyances at the moment, I don't understand why it doesn't do this already by default. This is one of the areas that Rally is clearly better than VersionOne.
In a meeting right now where this came up as causing frustration for our teams.
+1
A backlog item's status should really just be a rollup of its tasks statuses.
Waterfall delivery on this ask ;)
I could not agree more with the need for this enhancement. On my teams, there are multiple people assigned to multiple tasks under a story; ALWAYS confusion about who should close the story or mark it in progress for that matter. This enhancement is a "no brainer"......
The behaviour should work the same all the way up to the Epic as well. We have even more of a problem with teams remembering to move the epic into 'in progress'.
+1
+1
I wrote a python script you can run with VersionOne.SDK.Python installed that does this if you stick this in a cron job it will keep you from having stories with in-progress tasks lingering in Defined state for the specified sprint:
import argparse
from v1pysdk import V1Meta
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("url", help="URL to VersionOne instance")
parser.add_argument("user", help="username to login to VersionOne with")
parser.add_argument("password", help="password to login to VersionOne with")
parser.add_argument("scope", help="full name of project scope to update")
parser.add_argument("timebox", help="full name of timebox (sprint name) to update")
args = parser.parse_args()
v1 = V1Meta(instance_url=args.url, username=args.user, password=args.password)
inprogress = v1.StoryStatus(137)
for s in v1.Task.filter("Scope.Name='" + args.scope + "';Timebox.Name='" + args.timebox + "';Status.Name='In Progress'"):
if s.Parent.Status.Name == 'Defined':
print "Moved from Defined to In-Progress:" + s.Parent.Name + " due to task: " + s.Name + " state: " + s.Status.Name
s.Parent.set(Status = inprogress)
v1.commit()
I support the suggestion to add this functionality into the Transitions. Then it is up to each installation to decide whether to make the transition happen automatically or not. There is already similar thing that can be set to SignMeUp-functionality.
The suggestion of using Transitions is intriguing.
As a coach, I work with clients that are using Jira when I start with them, and we switch to VersionOne as part of their agile transition. I'm not a Jira expert, but one of the things they mention a lot is they miss the ability to script transitions on state changes.
Full Transition scripting is obviously more than just adding a Transition that could "advance" the state with some pre-defined side-effects. But it would be cool.
More on the topic of this request, I am skeptical we could all agree on what the proper roll-up of task status would be to the story status.
For example, when the first task moves to In Progress, I would want the story to move to In Progress. But I wouldn't want the story to move to Complete until all tasks are Complete, not with the first one.
Since we can define our own status set for both tasks and stories (which would in most cases correspond to some life cycle we want them to go through), how could we generically define the roll-up rules? I suppose there could be a rule set of some sort that let's us pick whether the story moves on first task or last task for each status, and what story status it moves to?
For kanban set ups, this is a bit trickier. We normally wouldn't use Not Started/In Progress/Done status tracking, but rather story state tracking for things like Developing/Verifying/Validating/Deploying (and queues in between where needed).
Tasks (if used at all) are to move a story from one state to another, so the completion of development-related tasks would presumably signal the story to move to the next queue or state. A deployment task that is not started would not stop the story from moving from Developing to Verifying, for example.
Another thing to consider is that all tasks going to zero hours should not be the sole determination of when a story is complete. There should be a definition of done that needs to be met. I would want a way to verify that the done criteria were met before automatically moving a story to complete when the last task completes. That could be as simple a prompt (perhaps optional) that asks me to say yes they were, to something like an actual checklist that I need to check each item before the story would be set to complete. IMHO, when we are just doing agile based on hour accounting, we're missing the point, but I know some companies operate that way.
I see this is in the planned bucket. Can we get an estimated ship date?
It's shipped! Automatic status transitions are available in the Fall 2014 release. The status of stories, defects and test sets can be configured to change to specific values whenever the status of a child task or test changes.
More details of the Fall release can be found in the release notes: https://community.versionone.com/Release-Notes-and-Downloads/Fall_2014_Release_Notes