A work item is a way of keeping track of
the tasks and issues that your team needs to address during the development
cycle. The status and number of work items are indicators of the health
of your project.
The out-of-the-box Scrum process provides multiple predefined work
item types, including the following:
- Adoption Item: tracks when changes by one team need to be adopted
by another team.
- Defect: identifies a bug.
- Retrospective: records what went well and what did not go well
in the recently completed iteration.
- Story: describes part of a use case.
- Task: describes a specific piece of work.
- Impediment: tracks things that get in the way of making progress.
- Epic: used when a story is too big to complete in a single sprint
or when there are too many unknowns to estimate the amount of work.
An Epic can be broken down into several stories.
- Track build item: typically created from a build result to track
the fixes needed for a failed build.
You can define additional work item types to complement the development
process your team follows.
As with defect-tracking systems, you can use Rational Team Concert™ work
items for the following purposes:
- Describing defects
- Describing feature improvements
- Identifying simple tasks, such as updating copyright notices
- Recording customer requirements
You can also use work items to generate a list of new features
that your team is delivering with a release. From a project management
perspective, you can use work items to provide metrics about the health
of your project.
While working on work items, you can:
- Associate source code change sets (from the Pending
Changes view) with work items so that users can navigate
from a work item to code and back.
- Attach documents and screen captures.
- Transfer ownership from one team member to another.
- Include them in plans for specific milestones by setting the Filed
Against and Planned For field values
to those of the plan.
- See which work items other team members are working on.
- Add an approval to a work item. When you add an approval, you
identify one or more users who should review, approve, or verify the
work done to resolve the work item.
- Start a chat session with the submitter of the work item or another
team member to resolve questions.
Each work item type has a state transition model that defines the
states a work item can be in and the actions that users take to move
the work item from one state to another. A typical state transition
model provides a path from a submitted or opened state to a resolved
or closed state. States in between those starting and ending points
allow users to indicate their progress in addressing the issues described
in the work item.
The primary mechanism for finding work items is the query. Rational Team Concert provides
some predefined queries to get you started, such as a query that returns
all unresolved work items assigned to you. You can create queries
to meet your needs, and you can share queries with all members of
your team or with specific users.