XP-Dev.com Documentation

Stories, Tasks and Bugs

Table of contents:

Stories

Stories are meant to capture business requirements. It should contain business language and try to capture a single functionality, task or role that a certain entity in a system does.

It should be kept short, simple and to the point.

For example, when building a blogging platform, a typical user story might be:

Bloggers would like to import their blog posts from Wordpress

Wikipedia has a full entry on user stories.

Stories are answers to What .. questions.

Tasks

For each story, you should define some tasks that implement the story. These are technical steps that are taken to complete and deliver the story.

Taking the example from above, tasks that deliver the story might be:

1. Add a SAX parser to read Wordpress XML export format
2. Add a file upload form in the *Admin Area*
3. Store parsed sections of SAX parser to Blog table in the database

Tasks should answer the How .. questions.

For each one of these tasks, you should estimate how long they are going to take. The total of this estimate will be displayed under the Stories tab of your project.

Bugs

Bugs are defects that get discovered in your application/system. They are just a flat list of problems. They do not attempt to categorise or group themselves into specific functionality as what stories & tasks do.

You could use Bugs as a general TODO list as well, and depending on your development processes, using the Bugs list as the exclusive task/issue management is perfectly fine.

Just like tasks, you can estimate how long a certain bug will take and add the hours that you've worked on it. All the statistics will be shown under the Bugs tab of your project.

Feel free to contact us if you need any assistance.