Work item tracking

Several teams now use burn down charts to track the progress of their work, so that they can see when they are falling behind, and decisions such as "this blueprint needs to be postponed" can be done as early as possible.

What is a work item?

A blueprint describes an entire goal or project, can sometimes take many weeks to complete, and can need more than just one person to implement it. For efficient tracking, these need to be broken down to several steps, each of which should not take more than two days. Items which need longer should be split either logically, or if that's impossible, artificially like "do something 1", "do something 2", etc.

One work item has :

• precisely one assignee who is responsible for it
• a status (todo, in progress, done, postponed)

Defining work items

Right now, the preferred and easiest method is to add work items to a blueprints' whiteboard. The start is indicated by a line "Work items:" (anywhere in the whiteboard), then exactly one line for each work item, and finally an empty line to end the work item list. Each work item is one line with the description, then a colon, and the status, and optionally has an assignee prefix in square brackets:

•   Work items:
    package gnome-monster: DONE
    write gnome-monster MIR: TODO
    [seb128] patch gnome-monster to support green monsters: POSTPONED
  
    pitti, 2009-11-27: can you please clarify the precise shade of green for the proposed patch?
    [.. further whiteboard discussion here... ]

Valid states:

The default assignee for a work item is the blueprint assignee. Use the "[assignee] description" syntax for blueprints where several people are involved.