Should I create a "placeholder" parent case, or set up Areas?

Question

I'm using FogBugz for Project Management, and I'm unsure how to structure my cases.

I have different features which require implementing as part of this project.

For example, if I have a new feature to include autocomplete on a search text box, this would have cases such as:

• Method for returning search terms
• Front-end changes to request method
• Front-end changes to display search terms

Should I create these as subcases under a "Autocomplete" case, or should they be created as top-level cases under an area called "Autocomplete"?

Answer 1

I guess ultimately it is down to user preference as to how you choose to use Areas, however I would strongly suggest that in this instance you should create a parent case, NOT an area.

The reason for this is that you do not want to clutter your areas list with each feature, if you create one for each "large" case (that requires sub-cases) then you would end up with a lot of unmanageable areas, and you don't have all the features with an area that you get the a case - such as being able to close an area, for whatever reason.

In my opinion, areas should be used to divide up a project as a whole. For example, you might have an area for "Design" and one for "Development". Or you might go even deeper and have areas like "Development - Database" and "Development - Application". Or perhaps if it is primarily focused on coding, you could create areas for each part of the system, such as "Admin", "Users", "Customers" etc.

As a side note, I have actually used parent cases in this way before and they work well. One extra benefit of the parent case approach is when it comes to recording time spent on a case. Any time spend on sub-cases is also visible (as a total) on the parent case. This is useful for reporting where you can easily see the overall time taken for a feature without having to worry about the time taken for each sub-case, which in some cases there can be many - even sub-sub-cases!

Answer 2

This is an appropriate place to use a parent case and sub-cases.

The reason areas are not a good fit for this is that they are permanent, whereas a given new feature is, if not exactly ephemeral, of limited scope. Once the feature is complete, you can close all related cases and forget about it, but if you associate them using an area, you have to keep the area around forever to maintain the association, and I can't see this as being much use (since you don't gain anything by it).