Behavioral Driven Design and Development, part 4

Tasks are a timebox. You don't get forever to work on them, they have a finite duration and need to be managed so that they are completed within the allotted time. Automation can be very good at this.

Tasks are an action item. There's work to do and automation can be very useful in determining if the work is complete. Automation is far more trustworthy to mark a task as finished rather than taking a human's word for it. Or relying on a forgetful human to keep things updated.

Tasks don't live in isolation. They are available to be worked on as soon as they are unblocked, however it's rare that a person has only one task on their plate at one time.

With B3D and the associated Symbyl product, when a task becomes unblocked, a notification is sent to the actor responsible for the work. This notification has three parts:

• A link to accomplish the work

• A link to explain what the work is, allowing new staff to come up to speed immediately.

• A link to the actor's WOMP (What's On My Plate) screen, showing all tasks assigned to them in business-value-ranked order

Click on the link, do the work and unblock the next task in line. It's as simple as that.

Now, about those tasks...

A task is a step in a workflow which an actor performs in order to unblock subsequent steps and actors. The workflow executes until a terminal condition is met - either the workflow succeeds or it fails.

With most workflow management tools modeled around Kanban processes, human beings are responsible for creating, assigning, executing and updating tasks and their statuses. It's no wonder that absolutely zero of these tools ever accurately reflect the underlying process they're modeling.

Our approach changes this.

Tasks have several characteristics which automation can greatly assist in managing.