Tuesday, February 06, 2007 8:31 PM
A few days ago I blogged about a discussion about MSF workstreams, activities, areas and iterations we had at the office (you can read about it here). The final decision (that I did not favour) was to include in our work items a field to indicate the current track/workstream/activity. The possible values were hardcoded like this:
The reason I did not like these customization is that I believe this information has no place in work items.
Workstreams and activities are like cooking recipes and their steps. Asking team members to indicate the current track/workstream/activity whenever they create or edit a workitem is like asking a cook to indicate at which step in a recipe they are after performing each step. It might be interesting to demand this meta-reflection as a way to make sure a team is following the process, but I do think this is practical or useful in everyday life.
The purpose of work items is to monitor work. Tracks, workstreams and activities are part of the process guidance.
The process guidance tells you how to do it. Work items track the work that you are doing. The following diagram (which I have seen in Team System presentations by Microsoft people) clearly shows this idea:
So, we have decided to remove the hard-coded workstreams and activities lists from our work items. However, the discussion is still alive (see next posts).