One of my customers has made the stipulation that every story should be connected to a Feature. They then go further and say that if we are making plans with higher levels of the hierarchy, then each feature is mandated to have a parent. Each parent is then mandated to have another parent all the way up to the overall grand plan (top most) level of the organisation.
The theory behind this is that if someone in the organisation is doing work, then there must be a reason for it. It also must be part of the overall work that is being done by the organisation and visible. To only have part the work visible is akin to measuring how many stories you generate, but not looking at the test cases and defects that these stories generate as they propagate out into customers environments.
There has been a lot of push back within my customer from various teams that like to be able 'to do their own thing'. To counter that, one could say that it is fine to do your own thing, but just make it visible so that we can understand it's value to the company.
My customer asked if I could look into how to count the 'connected' items. If this is ringing any bells in terms of your own organisation, or if you are also interested to know how much of your organisations work might be skunk-works, then try this app below and let me know if it useful or not. I would be interested in the feedback as to whether the app has any merit. The app can only see what you can, so for a big picture, you need to be subadmin and at the top level of the Project Hierarchy.
There are actually two parts to the app:
https://github.com/nikantonelli/Parentage-Trendhttps://github.com/nikantonelli/Parentage-Trend/tree/Parentage-Truth-Table------------------------------
Nik
Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
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