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Scrum process: Rank attribute in the Roadmap View


Martin Wassermann (13864144) | asked May 08 '13, 9:03 a.m.

Hello


The Release Plan of the scrum template contains the Roadmap View. In this view you can see the rank and a Gantt chart bases on the start end the end date of the work item. But the start end the end dates did not match with the rank. So, if I change the rank by drag and drop the order of the work items in the Gantt chart didn’t change.

Roadmap View after changing the rank

Is this a bug? Or is there a way that the order of the work items in the chart match to the rank of the work items?

Thanks and regards,
Martin

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Ralph Schoon (63.1k33646) | answered May 08 '13, 10:59 a.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER
Hi Martin,

I have seen the same and, unfortunately today, it is as designed. You have two options (I tried with 4.0.x):

  • The owner reorders them using the Eclipse MyWork View in Eclipse
  • You can drag and drop the bar in the roadmap to reorder them (this will show up in the owners MyWork view too).

I think it is equally true for the traditional scheduler in the Formal Planning template.

If you would like a different behavior or, for example an action to plan execution based on rank in the plan, please consider to create a work item here:  https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWelcome



Ralph Schoon selected this answer as the correct answer

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Geoffrey Clemm commented May 26 '13, 8:13 p.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER

This is probably the same issue that was reported in: The completion probability does not appear to be affected by the ranking or Ranking Attribute (189951) .   I added the plan execution ordering issue to that work item, and created a reference from that work item to this forum entry.



Ralph Schoon commented May 27 '13, 2:05 a.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER

Hi Geoff,

I have been talking to development about this and I created https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=266695 as an enhancement request. I linked your defect up to it. This is not a defect, but the way it is designed today. I realized that some weeks ago and agree, that it would be desirable to be able to reorder the planned execution of work items. 


Stephen Bromfield commented Sep 17 '13, 10:30 a.m. | edited Sep 17 '13, 11:59 a.m.

I think that this is a Defect. RTC shows no sense at all when ordering Task schedules. It appears to assign order Task schedules totally randomly, ignoring Rank and ID.


Ralph Schoon commented Sep 17 '13, 10:45 a.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER

As mentioned above, this works as designed, I think it should be easier too, but right now it works as planned. Please put your suggestions into a work item, for example here: https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=266695


Stephen Bromfield commented Sep 17 '13, 11:50 a.m. | edited Sep 17 '13, 11:58 a.m.

Ralph,

So how does RTC (using the OpenUp process) determine the order of Tasks? What criteria does it use if it works as designed?


Ralph Schoon commented Sep 17 '13, 11:57 a.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER

Please read my answer above. The user uses the my work view to order the items. If you look at the roadmap view, you also realize it is scheduled in the plan as next item, once you put an estimate in. You can drag and drop the bars on the roadmap to reorder the items, which will reorder them in the mywork view.

RTC was supposed to support agile, where the developers bottom up do what was agreed in the standup meeting, not for top down planning.

If that is not what you want, please support the work item I created: https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=266695


Stephen Bromfield commented Sep 18 '13, 9:35 a.m.

 Ralph,

Thanks for your reply, 
The first problem I have is that the planners at my customer do not have Eclipse installed and therefor do not have access to an Eclipse client.

Secondly, the only way I can see to re-order Tasks in the web client is to use a 'Planned Time' view in the Plan. Re-ordering in a Roadmap view does not seem to work. Unfortunately this 'Planned Time' view is only available in plans of type 'Iteration Plan', whereas our starting point for planning is to use 'Release Plans' (populating top level iterations first).
A workaround is to change the plan type to Iteration plan, re-order the Tasks, then change the plan type back to a Release Plan.

I'm still unclear as to how RTC orders Tasks in the openUp process. If it doesn't use Rank. nor ID, nor time of Task creation, nor the order defined in an imported MS Project plan, then what criteria does it use to determine the order of Task scheduling?



Ralph Schoon commented Sep 18 '13, 9:49 a.m. | edited Sep 18 '13, 9:50 a.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER

The order is only calculated in plans. The order data is only available in plans (and used in MyWork).

The Planned Time view can be configured for any plan by adding the "Accumulated Time" virtual attribute to the view. Which produces the roadmap view.

As far as I can tell, and as I tried to describe above, rank or priority does not have anything to do with the planned schedule. As soon as you provide an estimate the item is planned to be scheduled at the end of the list of already scheduled items.

So if you prioritize first and add an estimate later, you can get a reasonable ordered schedule.

I think this leaves much room for improvement too, hence I wrote the enhancement request. I think it should be possible to, similar to ranking, reorder the planned schedule e.g. beginning with a specific item e.g. in a ranked view. This would allow you to rank and order items and then push the order down to the users.

i am not sure that would solve all problems, because a user can have items for various teams in his list of work to do.


Stephen Bromfield commented Sep 18 '13, 5:47 p.m.

The ordering after estimating doesn't seem to work that way for me. 


For example, I'll have 3 Tasks with IDs of 1, 2 and 3 and Ranks of 1, 2 and 3 respectively. I estimate each Task as 1 day each. 

I assign Task 1 to myself, it schedules it. 
I assign Task 2 to myself, it schedules it after Task 1.
I assign Task 3 to myself, it schedules it before Task 1!

It seems to make no sense..This is my main area of concern. How to explain to my customer how the scheduling works so that they can work around it.

Secondly, if I drag Tasks around in the Roadmap view in the Release Plan, it has no affect on the ordering. I can only affect the ordering in a Planned Time view in an Iteration Plan.


Ralph Schoon commented Sep 19 '13, 2:26 a.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER

Consider filing a PMR, enhancement request, or defect.


Raviv Gal commented May 14 '14, 1:23 a.m.

Hi,
We came into the same problem.
Ralph, I agree with you that the problem is since we are trying to combine some "traditional planning" with the agile approach.
In our flow, we do the stories breakdown to tasks at the early stage of the planning. We know there will be changes, but we use it as a base reference for (i) Check that we can commit to the release content; (ii) Reference to check we are on track during execution.
As we understand the limitation of this initial order, we want to put minimal effort into it. No "formal template" dependencies required. However, we need to order tasks. We thought that this is what the ranking will do.

I will add it to Enhancement 266695 and I hope that it can be applied soon. I would expect it to be a simple one...

Thanks,
Raviv.

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