Support forum for your suggestions, questions and to notify us of any issues you may encounter.
+90
Under review

Facility to enter technical tasks for a user story

Anuradha Gajanayaka 13 years ago updated by Jim 5 years ago 20
When we do the sprint planning we divide the user stories in to further tasks. Mostly at the technical level. In the current version I don't see a place to enter the details tasks of a particular user story.

Something like a Kanban board would be really nice
+39
Under review

give names to stories

Michael Terkowski 13 years ago updated by Rob Scott 10 years ago 10
As a product owner, I would like to be able to give a name/title to a user story, so I could identify, relate and communicate them easily.

For example, the above story could be named "give names to stories" rather then GNA1.
+36
Planned

Drag and drop ranking of backlog independent of themes (e.g. T1S1, T2S2, etc)

Sandy Mamoli 13 years ago updated by Rob Scott 10 years ago 24
I'd like to be able to rank stories on my backlog independent of themes so that I can implement features and themes incrementally.

For example I'd like to be able to order theme 1, story 1 then theme 2, story 1 as my priority 
Answer
Hi Sandy

Thanks for the feedback.  This is an issue we're actively trying to address, but I'm not sure we've quite figured out the perfect way of fixing it yet, and hence not implemented it.  Hopefully you can help by answering a few questions:

  • When do you actually need to order these stories?  The reason I ask is that grouping stories by themes seems to be a popular feature for most users, however I understand some stories in some themes may be higher priority than another theme higher in the backlog.  When would you actually envisage ordering the stories and viewing the stories in order of importance?
  • If we added a priority field to each story so you can enter a number say between 0 and 100, would that suffice?  In the sprint view, one could then order by backlog order or priority order.
  • Do you think it's necessary to have two views for the backlog, one by theme, and one which is simply a long list that you can re-order?
Thanks,
Matt

+34
Under review

Naming Sprints

Mike Pearce 13 years ago updated by Matthew O'Riordan (Founder) 11 years ago 2

We don't use Sprint 1, Sprint 2... Our sprints have names, which are based around a theme. So, one team has a release theme of 'Wonders of the world', so each sprint is named after a world wonder, another has a Release named after a Rick James album, so each sprint is titled after a song from the album. Being able to call a sprint 'The Great Pyramids' or 'Love Interlude' means more to the team, PO, stakeholders and business than 'Sprint 1/2/3' does.


I'm sure this is a 'nice to have', but I thought I'd throw it in the mix for the next Fedex day. ;)


+18
Planned

assign a user/resource to a story/task

Julie Barnick 13 years ago updated by Jim 5 years ago 8
This product is very good, with that being said it had one glaring hole that forced us as a team to pick a different backlog tool.

We needed to be able to assign team members to stories (tasks assignment is even better allowing more than one person to work on a high priority story, but I can live without the task breakdown in a story).  Story ownership is also good when you have more than one person on the product team submitting backlog items.

Assigning developers/users to stories provides several different things:
1.  as a scrum master i need to manage resources and make sure i know who is working on what and what their workload velocity looks like for a given sprint
2. product owners need to know who to talk to regarding a story
3. team members need to be able to see at a glance the stories assigned to them

Agile purism says that always the top story is what is being worked on and all people are interchangeable and can work on all things... this is however not always a reality in organizations big or small and certain tasks or stories fall naturally to certain people.
Answer
Hi Julie

Thanks for the feedback.

We are in fact planning this feature, however it's not been high on our priority lists to date because we've been quite purist in our approach encouraging people to use physical boards for this type of assignment.  easyBacklog was not designed to replace physical scrum boards, and certainly not meant to be a collaboration tool.  However, we have got a lot of valuable feedback from our customers whereby they are telling us that there are valid reasons why people need scrum boards, need assignment of stories and or tasks to users.

Unfortunately this feature is a good few weeks away at least, but as soon the feature is ready I'll be sure to drop you a line so that you can try it out.

May I ask, the one thing you did mention is that a story can be assigned to one or more people.  Is that common or quite rare for you to have multiple people assigned?  Also, if we did not allow a story to be assigned to a user, but instead only allowed one more story tasks to be assigned to a single user, do you think that would work?  Basically, we believe that once you move a story into a sprint, you will typically break each task down.  Then as each task is owned / taken on by a user, he/she will assign it to themselves.  We are not sure that more than one person should ever own a single task.  And we are not really sure a story should be owned by a user, but instead the tasks should be owned by a user.

What are your thoughts on that?
+17
Under review

Add Business Value Field / Theme Importance

Mário Melo 13 years ago updated by Rob Scott 10 years ago 7
It would be nice if User Stories had a Business Value field. Also, themes could have an "importance" field. Then, when planning a Sprint the backlog could be ordered by ROI, like the formula:

( Theme Importance * User Story Business Value ) / User Story Points


Answer
Hi Mário

Thanks for the suggestion.  Unfortunately I'm reluctant to add even more fields at this stage as a lot of the feedback we've had has been to reduce the number of fields if possible as it's already quite busy with information.  Saying that, I'll keep a note of your request here, and if other start asking for something similar, I'll certainly consider a way to integrate this.

In terms of Theme importance, the idea is that you order the themes by importance, and you order your stories by importance.  So whilst there isn't a nice formula to give you a relative importance vs points required, it is quite straightforward to deduce this by simply looking at the backlog.

Matt
+16
Planned

I want to edit stories while in the sprint view

Mark Suman 13 years ago updated by Matthew O'Riordan (Founder) 13 years ago 0
During a sprint planning meeting, we often want to clarify statements in the stories. It would be great if we could edit the story right there instead of having to open a second browser tab to the backlog and find the story on there.
Answer
Hi Mark

Thanks for the suggestion.  This feature is in fact already in our backlog, and should be implemented in the next month or two.  We'll update this ticket as soon as it is.  Until then, I am sorry you need to keep using two tabs :(

Matt
+15
Completed

multiple users

Michael Terkowski 13 years ago updated by Matthew O'Riordan (Founder) 12 years ago 17
make it easy for a project owner to invite "users" for his scrum project, and to give them access (view, update, own) to only specific projects.
Answer
This feature was introduced 4 months ago.
+13

Jira Integration

Robbie Hughes 13 years ago updated by Rob Scott 10 years ago 6
Greenhopper is good, but this is much better for organising the backlog!
As a Product Owner, I WOULD LOVE to be able to get my backlog organised and syncd with Jira development tasks.
+13
Planned

Synchronization and work simultaneously

Marco van der Niet 12 years ago updated by Matthew O'Riordan (Founder) 10 years ago 5

It would be great if people could work simultaneously with the backlog. Currently, if more than 1 person works in the backlog synchronization problems will occur. 

Answer

Hi Marco


We agree, it would great if we could support realtime updates to the document you are working on.  It is in our backlog, and with your suggestion, we'll be prioritising this.


Thanks,

easyBacklog