+18
Planned

assign a user/resource to a story/task

Julie Barnick 12 years ago updated by Jim 4 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

Answer
Planned
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?
Answer
Planned
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?
+1
I agree that a story should be owned by one and only one user and that tasks should be owned by one and only one user.  That functionality is totally sufficient.

Physical boards don't work well when there are team members that are remote... we try to manage things electronically for optimum communication.
Thanks for the feedback Julie.  We'll be working on a solution for all of this soon.  We'll keep you posted.
Hi, how far is this on the roadmap? because a few weeks & 2 years is something quite different :)
I would rather see this done by integration with a tool more oriented toward task-based work, such as JIRA. Even a simple story could cross boundaries - requiring an API in a system managed by another team, for example.
it's already possible to assign users to a project, in the task editor you could want to set a task for a specific user, moreso while the feature is being developed
For those others waiting for this to be released - What I've been doing in the meantime is establish sprints that are resource focused. While I can't assign the resource in the software to a sprint or story, I can group stories into a sprint, then tell a resource they are responsible for that sprint. It's worked well for small projects and teams, so far, but this new function will be very welcome.

Hi,

Is there any update on this feature request? The last comment was 5 years ago.

Thanks