Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some good tools for keeping a software project on track?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–78 of 78 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are some good tools for keeping a software project on track?

#71

Post by blipblop »

I have found that revisiting the same documents during regular meetings works best. First starting at a high-level overview of the projects/milestones/deadlines/customers and then drilling down in the detail.

> Know what each other are working on? (progress/blockers)

a. Gantt chart = Asana + Instagantt

- Instagantt is great. It allows you to create a Gantt chart from multiple Asana projects. I have an Asana project for each customer project with the deadlines/milestones. I also have a project for Ops/Refactoring "projects" (changing ORM, dockerizing, etc.), a project for Releases, and a project for Meetings.

- I use to think Github could do everything but business-folk seem to struggle with it, and Asana is more flexible. Assigning tasks to people in Asana is great.

b. Kanban board = Github + Zube

To actually get things built we work in loose two week sprints. We create Github Issues for tasks we are working on usually keeping them quite broad as usually a lot of details emerge once we start working on them.

We estimate time based on Planning Poker with the goal being to become better at estimating time and scoping tasks.

> Know what is currently deployed to production and staging? (heroku)

I've started keeping details of releases in Asana. Could also use Github Milestones. We feature freeze releases to a branch called `release/0.5.x`, when we ship we use a tag called `release-tag/0.5.0`, and then tag our deploys with `deploy/staging`, `deploy/prod`, or `deploy/`.

> Keep track of larger goals (milestones)

We use a Gantt chart is visualise this, and usually some high-level strategy docs in Quip.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good tools for keeping a software project on track?

#72

Post by bshimmin »

logicallee wrote: post #70
bshimmin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the specifics of my examples, which really aren't important, the problem is the frequency with which these process failures happen. If the board is in a near-constant state of mayhem and flux because the sales director makes a list of "super urgent" bugs that have come out of a client meeting (because, of course, categorisation of bug urgency is not something mere mortals can really handle - everything is al…

This actually makes it super clear, thanks for expanding! What do you think about this: Based on what you've written, for companies that are married to Trello it almost sounds like there should be a 'staging' board and a 'production' board where the process failures you allude to can happen on 'staging', but the devs really just see 'production' -- and as soon as stakeholders stop interfering for a while they start m…

I think a Trello board for non-technical stakeholders to raise a load of stuff is probably a fine idea, and almost certainly better than hastily firing off emails that will disappear into a blackhole, as you mentioned earlier.

As long as that board doesn't interfere with an actual development sprint board, I would be totally happy!

Re: Ask HN: What are some good tools for keeping a software project on track?

#74

Post by BOOSTERHIDROGEN »

dannysu wrote: post #27

Tools don't keep projects on track. Communication skills and project management skills keep projects on track. I believe the most important task is to teach your team members those project management skills. Teach them the skills to recognize unexpected events and know to communicate those bad news proactively. For example, an assigned task turned out to be much more difficult or larger scope than previously thought?…

Any books about project management skills?

Re: Ask HN: What are some good tools for keeping a software project on track?

#75

Post by logicallee »

bshimmin wrote: post #72
logicallee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually makes it super clear, thanks for expanding! What do you think about this: Based on what you've written, for companies that are married to Trello it almost sounds like there should be a 'staging' board and a 'production' board where the process failures you allude to can happen on 'staging', but the devs really just see 'production' -- and as soon as stakeholders stop interfering for a while they start m…

I think a Trello board for non-technical stakeholders to raise a load of stuff is probably a fine idea, and almost certainly better than hastily firing off emails that will disappear into a blackhole, as you mentioned earlier. As long as that board doesn't interfere with an actual development sprint board, I would be totally happy!

Thanks for all your answers - this was interesting. :)

Re: Ask HN: What are some good tools for keeping a software project on track?

#78

Post by camclay »

Basecamp. Have tried Trello, and it's great for concisely scrumming specific small projects, but Basecamp's won us over with it's ability to manage multiple concurrent projects.

Project Management (Campfires), ability to set To-Dos, keep track of Docs & Files, and look at a master schedule is awesome.

You can quickly go from an overview to nitty gritty, and its easy to see what you and your team have accomplished.

Post reply on HN