After creating stories, all the key factors in a project have been touched, including lifecycle, resources, and stories. Now what you have to do is to do WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) for each story and generate all the tasks required to finish this story.

Notes: Finish all the tasks of the story, including but are not limited to design, development and test tasks.

1. Stories linked to a Project

On the page of Story, you can do the breakdown of a story. You can also check the number of tasks decomposed.

2. Decompose stories into tasks

Now you can choose stories from the drop-down when creating tasks. The link to check stories is also be provided in ZenTao. If the title of a story is the same as that of the task, just click Copy Story.

 Notes

• All the stories should be decomposed into tasks, including design, test, design, even machine procurement, and test environment deployment.
• The decomposition should be as small as possible. For example, a task can be finished within several man hours.
• If a task needs several members to finish, then it should be further decomposed.
• You can batch assign tasks, if the type of tasks is routine work. For example, a routine work is to ask every team member to write a project summary. In this case, you can select the type as routine work and then assign it to all team members.
• The type of tasks should be set carefully, since it will affect automatic calculations in development stories. We will explain this later.
• The tasks are best to be claimed voluntarily, since this will boost team members' enthusiasm to the utmost extent.

3. Multiple-user tasks and child tasks

Since ZenTao 9.6+, multiple and child tasks have been added.

3.1 Multiple-user tasks

When creating a task, you can check "Multiple" in the Assignee column, if you want to assign this task to multiple team members. Once it is checked, a "Team" button will show for you to click and select your team.

When select a team and team members, fill in man-hours for each team member. You can order members by drag-and-drop.

After you choose multiple assignees, the names will show in the Assignee column and the total man-hour will be calculated.

3.2 Child Tasks

Click "+" to create child task on task list page.

The page to add child tasks is batch create tasks page. Fill in the required fields and click Save.

Then you can check child tasks in the task list page. Click  to hide/show child tasks. The default setting is to show child tasks.

• After child tasks are created, the estimate, cost and left hours of the parent task is the sub total of that of all child tasks.
• When creating a parent task, man-hour is set. After creating its child tasks, the total man-hour of child tasks will override that of the parent one.
• Multiple tasks, tasks done by multiple members, cannot have child tasks.

If you have more questions about using ZenTao, leave us a message below or email us at [email protected].