Streamlining XP workflow

[ray pingree]

I'm somewhat of a newbie here, so please let me know if these features already exist!

In many XP projects new stories come in all the time from non-technical people (or people who don't understand XP), so it would be very helpful to have the enforced user roles of "biz" and "dev."

I'll explain this more in story form:

An admin can flag each user as "biz," as "dev," or as both.  (If you don't want enforced roles, you flag all users both). 

A user must be flagged as "biz" to post new stories, change story priorities, or edit iterations.

A user must be flagged as "dev" to edit ideal days and risk or to edit tasks within stories.

Here's where it gets fun:

When a "dev" user logs in, they see a list of "pending" stories - stories that have not yet been evaluated by a "dev" user since they were posted by a "biz" user.

A "dev" user can do one of the following things to a pending story
  - estimate both risk and time
  - reject it as impossible (story is deleted, author is notified)
  - say it needs to be split into multiple stories or otherwise amended (story is deleted, author is notified)
  - give an estimate of how many ideal days of research will be required to estimate the story.  if the story is added to an iteration with this kind of estimate, the comittment is for research, so completing the story is done by giving it a real estimate. 

[Olivier Chirouze]

Hi Ray and sorry for the delay.

I read your message carefully and I think your idea is good.

What I can tell you right now is:

You CAN already:
- create biz and dev roles.
- forbid iterations edition to dev and task edition to biz.

I MIGHT CODE soon:
- make exculsive right to a role for story priority (while another role could only edit risk and weight)

The fun part is a bit more tricky ;-)
- having "custom" plannig pages for different roles is a good idea. The thing is, you might want pending stories while other users might want other displays... that means we should do something that could be easily modified... that's a bit hard. If you have php skills we might work together?
- "notifying" users is a key feature that XPWeb lacks... I should try and find some opensource plugin but haven't much time...

If you're still interested I can at least code the specific "modify priority, modify other" rights for story. That would'nt be too hard...

Olivier