Task Life Cycle [closed]

Question

What task life cycle do you follow? and do you mingle tasks and bugs together in the tool you use? A typical Task life cycle is:

• Not Started - entered but not yet started
• In-Progress - being worked on
• Complete - task is done with the exception statuses of:
• On Hold - waiting for something
• Canceled- the task is no longer needed, possibly due to a change in requirements.

The typical bug life cycle could be:

• New - newly entered
• In Progress - being worked on
• QA - going through test
• Client Review - fix being reviewed by the client
• Ready for Promotion - ready for the next release
• Complete - released into production with the exception statuses of:
• On-Hold
• Duplicate Not Reproducible
• Works as Designed

What's your life cycles?

Answer 1

I like to keep it simple:

• Pending
• In Risk
• In Production
• Complete

I also have very specific visual aid colors for these tasks, when I list them in systems or Excel spreadsheets, as show above:

A detailed view of each one:

Pending is for tasks I'm stil not working on it, mainly because it requires some external event to start it, like some approval or just because I'm not sure that I'll make it anyway.

In Risk is for tasks that I did start but they are getting close to a due date and I'm quite away from finishing it. If I'm getting too much In Risk tasks I start to priorize them to get them done in time.

In Production is a regular task I'm working on. It maybe doesn't have a due date so it will never get In Risk, or maybe if I delay too much I set a due date and that task can change to In Risk.

Complete is pretty much self-explanatory.

Answer 2

Actually, we manage to have one life cycle for different kind of tasks

• Open
• Working
• Rejected
• To Be tested
• Resolved
• Close

That apply to our tasks based on ITIL (set of concepts and policies for managing information technology (IT) infrastructure, development and operations.):

• case
• change
• dependency (regroup several changes)
• release (regroup several dependencies)

Do not forget:

• a secondary task life cycle may be needed for certain tasks: for instance, before being opened, worked on, etc., a REL (Release) must be submitted first.
• an approbation life cycle can come along certain tasks: one can not submit a REL (Release) without an approbation list.