Project Management Tools

The traditional approach to project management is based upon the SDLC, the subdivision of tasks, and building a GANTT chart. I find that this process is too heavyweight particularly if I am working by myself, or with a small team. In addition, I find that the availability of cloud-based tools for Project Management are somewhat lacking.

Let us consider, that a team can be decomposed into a principal investigator, postdoc, graduate students, and undergraduate students.

The Digital Kanban Board.

Use this simple Kanban template to keep the engineering team on the same page and moving through work fluidly.

1. Break down the roadmap by adding tasks as cards to the Backlog list [PI and postdoc].
2. Move the cards one-by-one through Design as they becomes more fleshed out.
3. When a card is fully specced out and designs are attached, move it to To Dofor engineers to pick up.
4. Engineers move cards to Doing and assign themselves to the cards, so the whole team stays informed of who is working on what.
5. Cards then move through Code Reviewwhen they're ready for a second set of eyes. The team can set a List Limit (with the List Limit Power-up) on the number of cards in Code Review, as a visual indicator for when the team needs to prioritize reviews rather than picking up new work.
6. Once cards move through Testing and eventually ship to production, move them to Done and celebrate!

Rules for Cards

All cards should be written as [<task_name>]<short_description>. When the code gets to a stable place, this will be the feature branch for fairly large pieces of functionality, and should be included in the github commit message git commit -m "[<task_name>] <what was updated>" so it easier to understand the log.