At its most basic level, footloose is used to track work in progress and any blockers that are hindering progress. The following steps will get you setup in footloose to achieve these goals.
- Setup teams
Teams are the organizational units that do the work. They could consist of a single person through to unlimited size groups. In a software development project, a team would typically be a scrum of between 5 and 12 people.
A key concept within footloose is that teams should only ever be working on a small number of backlog items, ideally just one at a time. This principle should guide your definitions of both teams and backlog items.
When inputting teams, it is possible to setup some metrics:
- Weeks per sprint
- Target velocity if using story points for estimation
- T-shirt size definitions if you prefer these.
These metrics are used to drive scenario forecasting – see How Metrics Influence Forecasting for more details. If you don’t set these values, then the forecaster will assume defaults.
- Establish a Backlog
Use the Backlog feature to develop a list of work (backlog items) that needs to be done. Backlog items should be defined at the level where a single team can do all the required work. The backlog list is used to manage the status of work on an ongoing basis. Items are classified as “Not Started”, “In Progress”, or “Completed”. If an item is in progress, then the start date and expected end date must be set. If an item is completed, the actual end date must be set. It is preferred to set the team when known, even for “not started” items – in the web version the team name can be used to filter the backlog item list.
When setting up backlog items, it is possible to enter the number of story points, or a t-shirt size. Ideally, these values should be provided by the assigned team. Story points or t-shirt size are used to drive the forecast (see How Metrics Influence Forecasting). If no values are provided, then defaults are used for forecasting.
Hint: When operating with scrum teams, it is a good idea to set all the backlog items to be addressed in the current sprint to “in progress”, with the expected end date of the end of the sprint. The backlog list can then be used to facilitate daily standups.
- Add Blockers
Blockers are problems that prevent completion of backlog items. While Best Practice dictates that the entire team should focus on any blocker until it is resolved, this isn’t always possible. For example, resolving a blocker may require delivery of some physical equipment, which has a lead time from the manufacturer.
In footloose, blockers must be associated with a backlog item, and must have a predicted resolution date. Initially, indicative values can be used, and these can be edited in future. The “Additional Notes” feature can be used to log on-going activities to resolve a blocker, and these will create a dated log of activities.
Hint: the Blockers list is a natural supplement to the backlog list for discussion in daily standups.
Hint 2: for blockers that are expected to take a long time to resolve, set the impacted backlog item’s status back to “Not Started” and explore alternative delivery approaches using Scenarios.