Greg shared this explanation of how Release Engineering uses phabricator. Based on this, I think we can configure phlogiston to get some useful data. There may also be some phlogiston feature requests, which should be split out as separate tasks, as they are identified.
In our kanban board (Release-Engineering-Team (Kanban)) we have 4 columns: backlog, in-progress, blocked, and done. The done column is really for us to indicate to others that we consider the RelEng specific portion of this task to be complete. I wish this wasn't needed, but sometimes it is (tasks with too big of a scope).
I would love a way to see the relative amount and/or change of *open tasks* in these columns over time. I highlight *open* because we (I) are not good about moving closed tasks from whatever column they were in to the Done column once they're closed. Maybe I could get in a habit of doing that every week, but right now and historically we haven't as it just seems like busy work. Plus, we get the same information from "number of tasks in -kanban which were closed last week", for instance.
Also, on our general team board (Release-Engineering-Team), I would love to visualize the size of a few of those columns, notably:
- To triage
- Backlog (aka, things we'd like to get to some day) (actually a milestone)
- Next (aka, things we'd like to get to some day soon, but probably not this quarter) (also a milestone)
(Those two are milestones only because sub-projects don't show up as columns in the parent project workboard, but milestones do.)
The others (watching, and epics) don't seem as informative/actionable and aren't really useful to include in our general backlog numbers.