The projects

Here is a typical project tree. It immediately shows a number of useful information:
  • the total number of projects
  • the total number of sprints
  • the total number of tasks
  • the number of sprints in each project
  • the number of tasks in each project
  • the status of each sprint (indicated by the color of the project icon)
  • if the tasks have been already affected to a sprint or not (indicated by the color of the task icon – a grayed icon indicates that the task is already affected to a sprint)


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A project must be created for any new “product” you want to deliver. A project is usually a development project but can also be more generic. Project can be created for the development of the main product line but also for automated testsuites and much other internal project in your company.

A project is made of tasks. The task is the smaller entity that a developer can develop (a feature is made of several tasks).

The scrum methodology defines the notion of sprints. A sprint is the result of an iteration in the project. So, to deliver a product, you will deliver several intermediate demoable releases, each corresponding to a sprint. A sprint is generally at most 2 or 3 weeks long. A number of tasks will be associated to each sprint and at the end of the sprint a demo of all the features developed can be done. The sum of all the tasks of all the sprints must cover all the tasks of the project.


Create a project

To create a project:
  • in the tree, select a folder (create one if necessary)
  • on the right panel, click on the create project button
  • a dialog box is displayed
  • enter the name of the project
  • enter a focus ratio (this corresponds to the percentage of time that people will spend on effective work)
  • enter the description of the project. You can use the formatting tools (wiki-style) to format the text. Later, in reports this text will appear correctly formatted.
  • click on submit
  • immediately, the project appears in the tree

Create a task

To create a task:
  • in the tree, select a folder belonging to a project (create one if necessary)
  • on the right panel, click on the create task button
  • a dialog box is displayed
  • enter the name of the task
  • enter the description of the task. You can use the formatting tools (wiki-style) to format the text. Later, in reports this text will appear correctly formatted.
  • enter the priority of this task
  • enter the estimated effort in man.days (people working 100% of their time)
  • click on submit
  • immediately, the project appears in the tree

Create a sprint

To create a sprint:
  • in the tree, select a project
  • on the right panel, click on the create sprint button
  • a dialog box is displayed
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  • enter the name of the sprint
  • enter the description of the sprint. You can use the formatting tools (wiki-style) to format the text. Later, in reports this text will appear correctly formatted.
  • select the status of the sprint (at creation time, you can only choose Idle or Running)
  • select the start and stop dates for this sprint
  • click on submit
  • immediately, the project appears in the tree

Edit a sprint

The sprints will probably be edited several times by different people and will go through a complete workflow including three states:

Status Represents
Idle Idle sprint
Running The sprint is currently running
Finished The sprint if finished



To edit a sprint:
  • In the tree, select a sprint
  • on the right panel (details tab), edit the information you wish and submit
  • the duration (in effective man.days) is automatically updated

Note: Depending of the rights you’ve been granted, you may or may not be able to set the status to a specific state.


Allocate some resources to a sprint

All the tasks associated to a sprint will be performed by a pool of resources. These resources are users (taken from the user tree). To allocate some resources to a sprint:
  • in the tree, select the sprint
  • on the right panel, select the Resources tab
  • un-toggle the select filter button to display the complete user tree
  • check all the users that need to be allocated to the current sprint and indicate by editing the percentage of availability of each resource
  • (opt.) re-toggle the select filter button to display only the selected users
  • click on submit

Highslide JS Note: You can check if some of the resources are overloaded by checking their calendars from the user tree.


Associate some tasks to a sprint

A sprint will contain some tasks. To associate some tasks to one sprint:
  • in the tree, select the sprint
  • on the right panel, select the Backlog (this is a Scrum terminology) tab
  • un-toggle the select filter button to display the complete task tree
  • check all the tasks that need to be associated to the current sprint
  • (opt.) assign a specific person to a task by selecting its name in the Resources column
  • (opt.) re-toggle the select filter button to display only the selected tasks
  • click on submit

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Daily update progress of the tasks of a sprint

On a daily basis, you can update the progress of the tasks in a sprint:
  • in the tree, select the sprint
  • on the right panel, select the Backlog tab
  • move the progress bar of each task. While you’re moving the sliders:
    • the percentage of progress is update in the next column
    • the equivalent in days is updated in the next column
    • the last column indicates the estimated number of days for this task
  • click on submit

See the velocity charts/check the status of the sprint

  • in the tree, select the sprint
  • on the right panel, select the Velocity tab
  • some graph are displayed showing several useful information:

Highslide JS The top graph shows:
  • the theoretical curve of progress (the dashed red line)
  • the cumulated breakdown of all the tasks in this sprint

The bottom graph shows:
  • the theoretical curve of progress (the dashed red line)
  • the two curves representing the deal (top blue line) and real (bottom blue line) curves representing what we can do theoretically with the resources allocated
  • the status of the project:
    • Red area means that the project is at risk
    • Green means that the project is in a good shape

Searching

By name

All the trees in XStudio include an indexing system allowing to search real-time an entity in the tree by his name. To experiment it by yourself just start entering some text in the Search field of the tree

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To automatically select a searched item in the tree, you can move using the arrows keys within the suggestion list and validate by pressing Enter or just click on the item in the list.


By Id

The data model gives unique identifier for each entity managed by XStudio. The Ids are on the form:

Template Represents
TA_<id> Tasks



Ids are also available from XStudio’s GUI (in Details tab you have an Identifier field that corresponds to <id> in the templates.

To search for an entity from its Id, just type the Id in the Search Id field and validate.


Advanced and plain text search

Searching items such as tasks based on a combination of some very specific criteria can be not only very useful but extremely important to control/guarantee the quality of the products.


Procedure:
  • in the project tree, select the root node
  • click on the Search tasks button
  • type some text in the Text to search field and press Enter


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Generate Projects books

To generate projects books, follow the same instructions than those for generating requirement books (but from the Projects tab on the left panel).
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