3.5 Classification

When a large number of items are being tracked, it becomes increasingly important to have ways to categorize and classify the items being tracked in order to make them more manageable. To that end, AgileTrack provides a number of fields which can be used to organize the issues being tracked in the system. The fields can be used for filtering and sorting the issues in the system.

Project

Projects are a prime way to group the issues in the system. As projects can be organized into a tree hierarchy, assigning issues to projects allows issue lists to be created based on the same hierarchy. In turn, it becomes very simple to view small and manageable lists of tasks by effectively utilizing projects as a means to categorize issues..

Importance

When it comes time to plan what needs to be done, the most important stories and tasks should normally be handled first. To aid in selecting the most important items, each issue can be ranked by importance. Five levels of importance are available.

Critical
Required
Wanted
Would be nice
Maybe

While a short description is given for each level of importance, the description is just a basic guide reminder. It is really up to each individual team or organization to decide how to best utilize ranking items by importance.

Urgency

While some features and tasks may be considered and ranked as more important than other, some issues may have more pressing time constraints than others. For those who prefer to loosely rank issues in terms of due date, the urgency option may help. Urgencies as stored in AgileTrack are technically due dates, and are sorted as such, but since iterations are should be used for fine tuned planning, the urgency is meant to be more general, but also allow things to come to the top of the list over time. For example, if a task's urgency is set to "one year", it will automatically rise in urgency over time.

Yesterday
This month
Three months
Six months
One year

The loose urgency assignment is meant to be used to sort issuse in order of the most urgent items so that time doesn't need to be specnt considering the less urgent items when planning iterations. When considered in conjunction with the importance of and issue, the most urgent and most important items are those that should be completed first, and AgileTrack allows that to be made readily apparent.

Severity

Severity is a field of classification only available for defects. Defects can normally be categorized based on how severe the error is — e.g. whether the bug causes a crash, security vunerability, spelling error, etc. Clearly as an error is more severe an error, it is likely to be considered more in need of being fixed.

Catastrophic
Severe
Major
Minor
No Effect

As always, deciding which severity should be assigned to a defect is a question of preference best left to development and quality assurance teams.

Frequency

While defects may be very severe, they may not happen frequently, while bugs as insignificant as spelling errors may be seen constantly. The frequency at which an error occurs may play a big part in determining when it needs to be fixed. For that reason, AgileTrack allows defects to be classified by frequency and for that to be taken into account when planning iterations.

Constant
Frequent
Sometimes
Infrequent
Rare

It sometimes takes a while to get a feel for the frequency of a defect, but it is often useful in classifying the issue and making good decisions about what is important.

In addition to Importance and Urgency, defects can be classified using the fields Severity and Frequency. The classification fields are imprecise, but allow general ranking and classification of issues. Iterations should be used for fine tuned planning. It is up to your team to decide how valuable are such fields, and how to best classify issues in AgileTrack.

Next Section: 3.6 Assignment