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Task basics

Lesson 1 of 11 · 3 min 45 s. Episode 1 of the Jaah tutorial series: pick the project, describe the change in your own words, press Go, follow it on Tasks while an agent works, then read what it did, what it cost and the evidence in its report, and use the change in the app.

Before you start​

  • You are signed in to the console.
  • Your team has a project you can start tasks in. The lesson uses TimeSaver, a time-tracking app for small teams, and asks for a Pause button on its running timer.

Steps​

  1. On the Tasks page, click your project in the list on the left. Tasks now shows only that project's work, newest at the top, and whatever you ask for from here goes into this project.
  2. Click New Task at the top right. The form opens with the project already chosen.
  3. Describe what you want the way you'd say it to a colleague. The lesson's description is: Add a Pause button to the running timer, so a break isn't counted in the entry. That's enough: the agent reads the code, works out where the change goes, and checks it with the team's own tests before it hands anything back.
  4. Under the description, check the two choices. The first is how big the piece of work is: a single change is a task, which is already chosen. The second is how much you want to be involved; choose Unattended, which lets the agent make its own decisions and come back when it's finished.
  5. Press Go. The task appears on Tasks, waiting its turn behind any other work on the project's machine, and its line always shows where the work has got to. You don't need to stay.
  6. When its turn comes, the work starts by itself and an agent takes it on. It works on its own copy of the project's code, so nothing reaches the rest of the team until the change is finished and checked. A change this size usually takes a few minutes.
  7. Wait for the line's mark to change to finished. Before the change was accepted into the code, it passed the team's tests, and the agent checked it in a browser and wrote up what it did.
  8. Open the task. At the top is what you asked for, exactly as you wrote it, and the mark beside the title says it's done. Everything about this piece of work lives on this page, so the link to it is all a colleague needs.
  9. Open Details. Under Outcome, the agent says in a few lines what it built and how it checked it, with a link to the change itself. Below it, Task Run Metrics shows what the work took: how long it ran, how much of that the agent spent working, and what it cost.
  10. Open Artifacts. The agent keeps what it wrote here; for a change like this that's one document, the Report.
  11. Read the Report. It starts with what was built and why, then the checks: the team's tests, the agent's own look at the new button in a browser, and every item of the request, each with its result and the evidence beside it. It's the document to send when someone asks what was done.
  12. Try the change in the app. In the lesson, TimeSaver's timer now has a Pause button: press it and the clock stops counting, press it again and the timer carries on in the same entry.

What you learned​

  • The whole loop is: pick the project, describe the change, press Go, and come back to a finished change.
  • A task's line on Tasks shows where the work has got to: waiting its turn, taken on by an agent, or finished.
  • The result is under Details (Outcome and Task Run Metrics) and the evidence is under Artifacts, in the Report.
  • The agent brings evidence: the team's tests, a check in a browser, and a result for every item of the request.

Next​

Next lesson: Task sizing.

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