..and I have quite specific needs. I have some simple user stories:
Users Ben is a manager working in the Shared Tech Group (STG). The group is made up of 15 software engineers. Ben is interested in allowing his team to work on the things that matter while providing insight into what the team is doing.
Seb is a dev in the Shared Tech Group, specialising in graphics tech. He wants to see what work he has to do in a simple task list.
Simona is a dev in the Shared Tech Group who manages a small group of other devs. She’s interested in seeing her own task list as well as that of each of her devs.
Stories An urgent piece of work drops on Ben’s lap. It’s from a client and Ben wants to act on it right away. He fires up the tracking tool and types in a description for the new task, assigning it to Seb and setting a delivery date of tomorrow. Seb isn’t at his desk at that moment, but Ben knows that Seb will also have received a notification email to tell him he has a task very close to delivery date.
A dev finishes a piece of work. Seb completes a particularly thorny bug-fix in Rare’s game engine. He locates the task in the tracking tool and sets the time remaining to zero. The task is automatically removed from Seb’s task list and now shows up in his history list. Seb looks at his task list and decides what to do next. He could just take the top task and start work on that, but he notices that one of his other tasks is marked with a question mark. He knows that this means that no estimate has been set for that work.
A dev is derailed. Taking the top item from his task list, Seb begins some design work for a renderer feature. One hour in, Seb gets an email telling him about an urgent job and he decides to turn his attention to that instead. In the tracking tool he simply drags the task to the top of his task list. The whole team can see what Seb has on his plate and what order he intends to do things in.
Ben reports progress to a client. One of STG’s clients is asking when a particular feature will be completed. To find out Ben loads up the tracking tool and chooses to view the feature list. Since the feature list is large, Ben reduces the amount of stuff he has to wade through by typing keywords into the search box. Having narrowed down the features he finds and selects the feature in question. Ben can read off the time remaining to complete the whole feature, as well as expanding it to see which sub-features are completed. Ben chooses to pass this information over in person, but if a meeting wasn’t possible at that time, he could have emailed over a hyperlink to the feature in the tracking tool.
A new feature is added to the roadmap. Ben gets wind of a new feature requested by a client. It’s a significant chunk of work. Ben enters the new top-level feature description into the tracking tool and asks Simona to get it broken down and estimated. Until this happens there is no delivery date for this item. If the client was pushing for a certain date Ben could have added that ideal delivery date in the tracking tool.
A feature is broken down by devs. Simona has been planning with her team and they are ready to break a feature down into more manageable chunks. Simona loads the tracking tool and searches for the feature in the main feature list.
A client’s priorities change. A client informs Ben that they would rather have feature B, even though they had previously asked for feature A first. Ben loads up the feature list tracking tool and drags feature B above feature A. When this happens the tracking tool turns the description text of feature A red. Ben knows that this means that the delivery date for feature A will now likely be missed, and can reschedule accordingly.
Assumptions A task can only be assigned to a single person at a time.
The tracking tool works out the delivery date of a feature based on summing up the work remaining on the sub-features. If multiple people are working on sub-features, it assumes those work can run concurrently (i.e. people don’t block each other).
My question is: does anyone know of an existing tool that supports all these stories?
My final requirement is that I have to either be able to host it myself or, if hosted by a third party, the data must be secured from prying eyes!