[almighty] modeling 'types' for planner work items

[Alexey Kazakov]

On 09/30/2016 06:35 AM, Todd Mancini wrote:
> I'll go on the record as saying that I once helped create a system 
> whereby child tasks could automatically update parent tasks -- for 
> example: "all the children are done, so mark the parent as done."
>
> It was a terrible, terrible mistake.
>
> Yes, on paper, it looks like the right thing to do. In reality, 
> reality is much, much different. For very strict, waterfall processes, 
> it can sometimes work. But that assumes you've got a completely 
> well-defined, repeatable and essentially unchanging process. (e.g. an 
> assembly line or a process you manage with a Gantt chart). But, 
> outside of that scope, it rarely works well.
>
> e.g. consider a value prop broken down into experiences to be 
> accomplished over the next 6 months. Assume all of the experiences are 
> completed. Is the value prop now 'done/realized'? Maybe it is, but 
> maybe it is not (or at least not fully). Maybe to fully realize the 
> value prop requires three 6 month seasons of experiences. In other 
> words, just because I have 4 children now doesn't mean I won't have 
> additional children later. The closing out of the value prop is really 
> a human decision, not an algorithmic one.
>
> Will some people want automatically closing parents? Probably. Should 
> we have that as an option? Maybe, but not for Pizza the Hutt. Many, 
> many popular systems are surviving without this feature and happy 
> users. The unhappy ones can go use IBM DOORS or something like that. :)

I would say this option could be useful on a task level. Not a global 
one. For example for some tasks automatically generated by the system 
and where the list of subtasks is not supposed to change. For example in 
devstudio when we release we generate a task to create a New and 
Noteworthy docs with a bunch of subtasks per component. So when such 
system generated tasks are closed it would be useful to have the parent 
task automatically closed too. Not sure there is any use case for the 
Pizza the Hutt right now but it may be useful in the future.

Thanks.