We're looking at using Asana to combine CRM, administration and issue tracking in a web dev firm. The key feature we need is a view of the "next actions" or "top [1|2|3] priorities" across all projects in a workspace, irrespective of who they are assigned to. It seems Asana does not provide this out of the box (is that right?) so I am looking into writing API queries to pull this out into a dashboard of our own.
I understand you don't want to let people pull ALL tasks in one workspace, as it may grow, but is there a way to pull out the top few open tasks in each project, without having to specify the assignee?
(I work for Asana)
Currently, the API allows you to grab all tasks in a project, see https://asana.com/developers/api-reference/projects. It will return them in ranked order (the same as they would show up in the Asana UI), however it won't limit them to some number; you'll have to get them all. Limits and pagination are on our roadmap to enable developers to work more efficiently with larger projects and workspaces.
So, it seems like you'd want to grab all projects, then iterate through them and query all tasks - this will give you their name and ID by default. If you want more detail for the ones you're going to show, then I recommend querying the details on each of those tasks individually.
Related
We are migrating from an in-house tool to Jira for managing our scrum board, and we have concerns that I have been unable to resolve by searching the Internet. But you folks are smart, right? ;-)
Our current scrum board shows the usual swim lanes across state columns (for todo, progress, review, done). Each swim lane represents a user story, and has a link to (and a snippet of) the user story description in Jira. It also has a number of 'tickets' (these would be subtasks in Jira lingo) that start in 'todo' and move across to eventually end up in 'done'.
So far, Jira can do all of this, too (although creating sub-tasks is rather a lot more work in Jira than in our in-house tool). However:
When we commit code, we include a ticket ID in the commit message, and thus each ticket displays a list of commits that were done to complete that particular ticket / partial story. I haven't been able to find out how to do this in Jira -- if it's possible at all. Instead, it seems one must open a sub-task to see if there are any commits on it?
Each commit also shows its review state, which gives us an excellent overview of how close to done a ticket really is. I haven't been able to find out how to do this in Jira -- if it's possible at all. Instead, it seems one must open the sub-task, and drill down further into Fisheye(?) in order to see the review state?
In total, our tool provides a one-screen overview of the state of each user story, ticket, commit, and review state; and it's very lightweight to pull in new stories (from Jira) and add tickets. We fear that Jira is not able to provide such a one-screen overview, forcing us to open Fisheye in order to know whether a given commit has passed review.
Is it really true that Jira must be this cumbersome?
For reference, here is what a single ticket (subtask) looks like in our system:
And if you look at the whole scrum board, it's actually quite easy to get a feel for the number of commits on individual user stories and tickets, and the ratio of pending/passed/failed code reviews:
I agree with your fears when you say
We fear that Jira is not able to provide such a one-screen overview
In my experience (7+ years with Jira/Agile) I've not seen a such condensed view of information about a sigle user story even on a swimlane with relative cards.
Also in the Atlassian marketplace there seems to be no good plugin to solve your issue, even partially.
To make such move from your in-house tool to Jira retaining all you have there, I fear you should develop a custom Plug-in using Jira SDK to integrate with the agile boards.
It may be enough to start by developing a custom field to show what you need from a "ticket" (ie sub-issue) and trying to insert it into one of the three "slots" available for cards (I mean Rapidboard card layout configuration screen).
If you wanna try, start from here.
Another option to create a new custom field would be the Adaptavist Scriptrunner plugin. It will ease the building of custom fields: your new field can be written also in Groovy rather than plain Java. I've used it to build an extended status custom field (just to give the user an immediate big picture of it) that informs him in plain english and with stylish css colors why an issue is blocked or anything else relevant, getting data from other fields or linked issues that are not immediately visible to the user. IMHO, it is very similar to your problem.
we use Asana as our internal project management platform. We would like to use it to interact with our clients so they can see the progress of their projects - which is the same per year. We created the Kanaban view and move the cards through each process. We would like to show this to our clients, but have them only see their card.
Is there a way of doing this?
Thanks
There isn't a way that I'm aware of to have only certain tasks show up to certain people within a project - our access control is limited to the project level, so everyone who can see a project can see all tasks in a project.
One thing you might consider as a workaround is to multi-home the tasks into multiple projects (that is, add them into multiple projects). In this way you can limit membership to the second project to only the people in that set of clients, and have your original project as a master board with just your team in it.
You will have to keep these projects in sync, but this is possible in our API. Our tasks/addProject endpoint accepts both a project and a section (which is admittedly a bit unintuitive). If you maintain a mapping of each section, that is, "ID of Column A in the master board view maps to ID of Column B in the client board view", you can periodically iterate over all your tasks and re-insert each task in the client board view in the correct column based on where the task is in the master board view. (addProject is idempotent across requests, so re-insertions into a project are OK).
This is an interesting use case, thanks for sharing it! Hopefully this workaround will prove to be usable.
I'm trying to build a query to retrieve the tasks of project that contains an specific tag.
I'm being able to retrieve the tasks of a project or to retrieve the tasks that contains an specific tag, however I wasn't able to find a way to combine those.
As workaround I'm retrieving all the tasks of the project and doing the filtering on my own; however that won't scale with a project with many many tasks.
Currently you can filter by project OR by tag, but the Asana API does not yet offer a more advanced search or way of combining filters. I agree the best way to achieve this currently is to fetch the set of tasks by either project or tag, whichever set is smaller, and then do the filtering on your own.
I have a set of queries on the Team home page that use the standard #Me, for example to let different users quickly get to bugs they have personally raised, PBIs they created that are now in a certain state.
The users are in customer groups and I'd like to have a similar set of queries showing as tiles on the home page, e.g. "Team Open Bugs", "Team PBIs for review".
Is it possible to write a query that does this -
Select all [work item type] from [team project] where [state] and [#myCustomerTeam] ?
From what I have read so far I believe this is not possible, and certainly not possible through the UI. I'm curious to find out if anyone has solved a problem like this - having different customer groups see different Team Favorites tiles on the Home page of Team Web Access - in some other way. I'm going to try making three sets of queries and putting different permissions on them (there are TFS groups that correspond to the Customer Group field) but I'm not confident that Denying even Read permission on the query itself will stop the tile showing on everyone's homepage.
Edited to say that solution worked for my purposes, as per comment.
Still interested to know if anyone has managed something like this more cleanly. In this case the field I would have liked to parameterise happened to be something I could map to a completely different type of thing, thus shifting the problem. I can imagine wanting to parameterise a field that didn't have that characteristic though.
What is the best way to store a task for multiple users in TFS 2010 ? I can only assign one for one task.
(for example: when I plan a demo to all developers)
(this is a scrum Msf Agile project, where the task is part of a user story)
I'm sorry to tell you that you can't assign multiple users to a single work item out of the box; At the same time, I do not recommended trying as this, as it does not fit the model in TFS. The conventional / recommended way to handle this type of scenario is to create multiple tasks; one for each developer in this case. You can easily accomplish this by copying a set of tasks using MS Excel. Another option (given the example you used) is to create a "Meeting" work item that has multiple drop-downs - one for each person that would attend meetings like for a demo or a technical review.
Yet another option is to create a custom control to format and store a list of users. This would likely be relatively complex to maintain, as you have to distribute it to each user's machine (it will need to be installed locally), and last I checked you would need 2 versions; one for the Team Explorer user interface and another for the Web Access tool that most people use to create work items from a web page on their TFS server. Future updates to TFS could possibly break your custom control. It is rarely worth the effort. Another downside is the you would likely be limited by how you can use MS Excel to work with the data you store in the field that the custom control works with. If you want to look into this further you can find some examples in the following CodePlex project: http://witcustomcontrols.codeplex.com/
You might consider your true goals in tracking such things as meetings and other items you want to assign multiple people to. Tasks are the heart of tracking progress of user stories in the MSF Agile Template. Tracking meeting attendance does not typically relate directly to a User Story, for example; so it won't typically assist you to determine how much close you are to being "done" with a User Story. If you want to take advantage of the existing reports, then you should organize your tasks so that they roll up as child work items to User Story (or Bug) work items.
Short story: you can't. Work items in the Process Template of Microsoft are designed to target nobody or only one User.
Now you can customize the Process Template to change this.
Take this post for instance, the customization works for group. But I don't recommend you to do so because TFS is basically not designed for that and you may end up disappointed.