Show HN: Project Management as Code with Graphviz

Glad to see somebody else trying something like this. I was manually maintaining some charts like this for a while at a prior job and was toying with productizing it, it's super powerful, especially if you've got a large backlog or a large feature list ahead of you.

I wanted to have another representation that generated the GraphViz files, though, so you could more easily do other work with the data. Some other features we thought we needed:

* Notation of whether a dependency was "can't start until it's done" or "can't finish until it's done" to designate whether or not an item and it's deps could be in progress concurrently or if the earlier project needed to be completed first.

* Attach rough time estimates to each node (person-week granularity)

* Generate a list of "eligible" projects, i.e. those things with no hard blockers

* Sort this list by how much downstream work it blocks. Probably by each of: number of work weeks blocks, number of projects it blocks, and depth of the tree it blocks. This would help identify the boring projects that stand in the way of everything.

* Generate a list of "up next" projects that had only one in-progress blocker and thus were eligible for moderate discussion, but couldn't be allowed to dominate meeting time.

* Generate another list of "off limits" projects that had at least one blocker that wasn't even in progress yet and thus were a waste of staff time to meet about. No point having design meetings when something is 3 nodes deep in the graph.

I ultimately left because the management was insane and irresponsible and undermined these efforts once they started to set in well (because they removed her absolute authority to monkey with priorities). But I think it's a system that works well with sane management. At present I don't have enough backlog to need this tool, but look forward to working on it again one day.

Most of these graphs don't seem to have too many connections.

Wouldn't a checklist layout be much better?

For simpler projects, yes. The more complex and shared the project the more value there is in documenting and sharing dependency relationships in code, as described in the article.

Great write-up! I tried something similar for modelling out the Snowplow release dependency chain (https://github.com/snowplow/) - I gave up and started looking at SaaS alternatives, but inspired by this I am going to try again.

For the record, I didn't find any good product management or project management tools (SaaS or desktop) which acknowledge that roadmapping any sufficiently complicated platform or product family is best expressed by a directed acyclic graph. Casual.pm had the right concept (https://casual.pm/) but the implementation was very primitive.

I've found it quite hard to get non-technical people on board with this.