As I talked about at the end of my AppFabric TV interview, I use a tool called ScrumPig to manage my personal workflow (one day, I would love to try it out across an entire team, but baby steps). Recently, ScrumPig 2 was released, and added a very handy new feature for something that was becoming more than just a slight annoyance for me. To give you a better idea of what I’m talking about check out a snapshot of my backlog.
The problem here is all of the items with the green diamond. These represent completed items – and as time progresses, they (hopefully) multiply in numbers. And while looking at such a view should make me feel super-good about myself, instead it just creates a bunch of clutter that keeps me from clearly seeing the next things that I need to work on. Fortunately, ScrumPig 2 added a rich search syntax – and while I’m not going to blog the entire help doc on the subject, the following excerpt enables me to easily see just want I’m interested in:
General Syntax
text Matches the item name
“text” Matches the item name
#number Matches the item number
+term Must match
-term Must not match
Tasks
<p> Matches the pending state
<i> Matches the in progress state
<c> Matches the completed state
<b> Matches the blocked state
<x> Matches the cut state
As such, by simply entering -<c> in the search box, I get a view of all backlog items that are not completed.
