How to create a new story status in sprint plan dashboard

[Kagilum]

Hi !

Im new to icescrum, I tried to create a new status column in sprint plan dashboard in addition to the existing TODO, IN PROGRESS and DONE columns. But I could not create new one.

I would like to know how I can create a new column ? I would appreciate your help and suggestions

Thank you

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hi,

There is no way to do that. Actually we thought a lot about this feature and we concluded that the cons outweigh the pros.

What columns would you want to add?

In many cases, we noticed that this feature is requested in order to create a “REVIEW” column but this column would have very little use: automated tests are expected to be developed at the same time as the code so the tasks are reviewed continuously from their beginning to their end.

[Kagilum]

Hi Nicolas,

Thank you for the reply.

Actually our requirement is distinguish INPROGRESS status into two status as DEVEVEOPMENT INPROGRESS and TESTING INPROGRESS.

[Nicolas Noullet]

I guess that “testing” here would mean unit testing the task, since integration and functional testing would rather become another task in the story.

Scrum does not come with engineering practices but quality cannot be ensured without them. Thus, such practices should not be forgotten in order to ensure the success of agile projects.

One of the most important of those practices is Test Driven Development (TDD), where tests are developed alongside with the code. Then, there is not “testing stage”: tests are integrated into the development process and there is not test team: testing is part of each developer’s responsibility. More generally, intermediate stages should be avoided because they create stock, waiting time, reduce the visibility, increase the feedback loop, split the responsibility between different team members or even different teams, etc.

Of course it may seem that I am talking about the ideal of agile projects, and reality is often different. But unlike other tools that just integrate agile terminology into regular project management features, we try to make iceScrum facilitate and encourage good agile practices and we don’t implement features that encourage bad practices while not providing significant value.

[Kagilum]

First of all, a quick note on how useful I think IceScrum is. It has saved us from having to maintain a physical scrum board, and it generates burn down graphs. Neato!

That said, I can’t help but get the feeling from this discussion that there are other reasons why it’s not possible to add an extra status column (for instance, because it means a lot of work to make the existing functionality flexible w.r.t. the number and meaning of status columns).

“Forcing” how Scrum teams should work shouldn’t be a reason; teams should be able to decide themselves. We use a code review, and would like to indicate that a particular issue is “IN REVIEW”. A column would help.

As a workaround, we could for the moment use the comments or task description to add a link to the code review. Do you have a better suggestion?

Anyways, Thanks!

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback!

Before trying to address your specific needs, I will answer your more general comments:

You are right, adding columns and making them convenient would require a lot of work. The cost of development is significant in Product Ownership decisions: the Product Owner is likely to prioritize features that add the most value for the minimum cost.

However, the cost of a feature cannot be considered independently: it must be weighted regarding the value it provides. This value is not absolute, it depends on the product vision. As part of our vision, we believe that following agile principles a key success factor. Thus, for us, a feature that encourages that brings much more value than one that can (and will) be misused at the expense of projects success.

Another important thing to consider is complexity (from the user point of view): adding features, even if they are all very valuable and well implemented, can lead to unusable software. Thus, we tend to avoid developing features that have a significant complexity overhead if they can be worked around with existing features.

This makes iceScrum an opinionated tool: toward agile values and toward simplicity. This can take precedence over allowing teams to “decide themselves”. If it was not the case then iceScrum would probably be a mess of configuration (somewhere between Excel and Jira, maybe worse) and would help micro-manage, track individual performance, transform sprint into waterfall…

Regarding your specific issue, if I understand well there are two needs:
– Provide the link to the code review: the notes and the comments are a good place to do so because they offer rich text editing to make links clickable. The notes may be better because they are displayed in the “quick view” (opened by double-click).
– Show that the item is in review. If you do review on whole stories then I would recommend to create a “Review” task so it is made clear when it is to do, in progress or done. If reviews are at the task level then you can use task custom colors to make it visible that the task is in review.

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