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Sub-tasks of the Story according to the Definition of Done

Ivan Bilobrk
Contributor
November 27, 2023

Hello everyone,

we are in the phase of setting up and testing the SCRUM environment for our development projects. We'd like to make sure we're on the right track with the community's experience, and we'd really appreciate it if you could share your experiences and perhaps alert us to any issues or limitations in this part of the process that I'll describe below.

 

When designing this part of the process, we had the following goals:

  • ensure that the Definition of Done is clearly visible to all members of the development team, but not in the form of notes or a list, but that the Definition of Done is converted into concrete tasks (sub-tasks),
  • ensure that the DoD is set before starting work on a particular Story,
  • automate the creation of sub-tasks according to DoD,
  • get the possibility to easily filter tasks depending on the type of work (Development, QA, Documentation, ...), so that we can create separate panels, etc.

 

Considering the above, we are currently using (testing) this process:

 

1. At the Story level, we have defined a custom field "Definition of done (DoD)" by which the Product Owner defines what all actions need to be done in order to complete the Story. For example, the values can be:

  • Code developed,
  • Code reviewed,
  • Unit tests complete and passing,
  • Automated acceptance tests complete and passing,
  • User documentation updated,
  • Ops documentation updated,
  • etc.

Some of the values are marked "true" by default.

 

2. When changing the status of the Story (currently to the status Ready to start), the automation that creates subtasks for the Story is triggered. The sub-tasks that are created have an issue type depending on the type of work to be done, so for example we can have sub-tasks of the following types:

  • Dev Sub-task (for development, code revision, etc.),
  • QA Sub-Task (for testing),
  • Docs Sub-Task (for updating documentation).

Therefore, each member of the development team works on the Story exclusively through a sub-task. In this way, we have a clear picture of which part of the work is completed (or not).

 

3. We plan to add automation of status changes on Stories and sub-tasks that are dependent.

 

The dilemmas we have at the moment are the following:

1. Story points are of course estimated at Story level. But the Story itself remains assigned to the Product Owner, while each of the sub-tasks is assigned to someone else. Does this affect Sprint itself and in what way? Workload by assignee shows only people assigned to Stories, so when planning a sprint, we won't see the workload of other team members.

2. According to your experiences, is the direction described generally good or do you have suggestions for a better solution? What we want to keep is that each member of the development team has their own task that is part of the Definition of Done, for our three main areas of work: development, QA, documentation.

3 answers

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Antuan Sammak
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November 29, 2023

@Ivan Bilobrk 

you can definitely use Scrum kind of board and still apply some of the above suggestions i provided and use estimates on subtask level. 

i really encourage you to explore the advanced roadmap in jira which also works perfectly well with Scrum framework.

 

last but not least, i would appreciate if you give our application a try, I think this will add benefit to your sprints analysis and provide you with good insights about your team velocity and performance.

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Ivan Bilobrk
Contributor
November 29, 2023

@Antuan Sammak 

Thanks for the welcome and sharing this use case.

It's always interesting to see how customizable Jira is. ;)


We want to use the Scrum framework and estimates in points at the Story level. Eventually, we will use estimates in time units on sub-tasks.

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Antuan Sammak
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November 27, 2023

Hi @Ivan Bilobrk 

 

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I like the approach you explained and I have actually built something similar in my previous experiences, however i followed a slightly different method which is not very traditional one.

 

1- I used Kanban project instead of Scrum so i can have more flexibility in configuring the project parameters.

2- i used estimations which can be done on subtask level and they will sum up towards story level

3- i created different Teams and assigned to each one different capacity, this can be done on actual team level or on individual level

4- advanced roadmap would be the next step to plan capacity based on assigned teams and estimates

5- group my team work into release versions on weekly basis then run my reports against those versions

 

all the above would be needed to be powered up by automation of course, happy to expand further on any of the above points if required.

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