Hello Rob,

sorry to hear that you experience issues with OpenProject.

Let me address the issues you mentioned:

1. Tasks randomly show up in the Sprint Impediments row, and I can’t figure out how to remove them. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why they show up there.

Tasks show up in the “Sprint Impediments” row when they are assigned to a sprint but do not have a parent work package which is displayed as a story in the sprint (e.g. Epic, User Story). This is caused by the fact that “Sprint Impediments” are in fact Tasks in the background. In order to remove them from the “Sprint Impediments” you can either remove them from the sprint or assign them to a parent work package which is part of the sprint (in which case they will show up in the appropriate row in the task board).

2. (Updated) As far as I can tell, there is no good way to work with Epics that extend across multiple sprints. The entire Epic hierarchy has to be assigned to a single sprint in order to see it in the task board.

The task board is really intended to manage the user stories, features (and possibly bugs) and their tasks. Epics don’t really fit into this view since they are on a higher level. However, I understand the need to keep track of Epics and their associated user stories.
There are two helpful ways to keep track of this:

1. You can either assign Epics to their own version / backlog (e.g. located in parent project used to higher level management). By clicking on the ID displayed next to each Epic’s name you can open the associated work package fullscreen view and use the “Relations” tab to see the associated user stories (child work packages) and their status.
2. Alternatively, you can use the work package list for the Epic perspective. The associated user stories are then shown as children in the work package list. By displaying the “Version” as a column you can always see in which sprint the different user stories are. This way you can also display multi-project hierarchies (e.g. if you have a main project which is used for managing the Epics and different sub projects representing e.g. different development teams. The individual development teams can then of course work in the Backlogs view to manage their user stories and tasks).

3. Tasks that are not part of a WP hierarchy (e.g. an Epic) cannot be moved across the task board according to their status. I don’t know if this is a bug or limitation of the design, but this makes the task board really unusable the way our company does Scrum. In a given sprint, we may have 5 or 10 small miscellaneous tasks that are not part of a user story. It would be burdensome to create a catch-all user story or epic to group together all these miscellaneous tasks.

Tasks always require a parent (e.g. user story) to be shown in the task board. The reason being that otherwise you would not see if a sprint has been completed just by looking at the sprint on the Backlog (but you would have to always switch to the task board). By requiring a parent (e.g. user story) you can see from the backlog view if any of the user stories have not yet been completed.
In fact, if you assign tasks to a sprint without a parent they will show up in the “Sprint Impediment” row (see answer to issue 1).

4. Story points for child WPs do not roll-up into the story points for their parent. So you have to separately manage story points at each level in the hierarchy.

This is indeed a bug (tracked in #22545). Story points should be “inherited” up the work package hierarchy in a similar way as e.g. the values for “estimated time” are).

We are planning to update the backlogs view and use a similarly flexible UI as in the work package list. This way some of the issue you mentioned (such as displaying multiple hierarchies of work packages (e.g. Epic > User Story > Task)) can be displayed more easily.

Btw: Since you are using the Cloud Edition you can also contact us message us directly through our support email if you experience additional issues (this way you will receive a response more quickly).

Best regards,
Robin