My Full English – Project Management

Personal projects can quickly become lost by the wayside. The initial momentum is difficult to maintain throughout the project cycle. That’s why it’s always good to consider how you’re going to manage the project early on. Part of this process should be to consider how you intend to keep the project active in your consciousness and how to keep delivering features.

Approach

From the outset, we knew we were going to run the project with an Agile methodology. So delivering key features from the project backlog quickly as part of a 2-week sprint cycle was how we intended to deliver the application.

Tools

In an ideal world where money isn’t a concern, I would always recommend going down the Atlassian route. Their products are second to none with seamless integration between them making the process completely pain-free. However, it is expensive. The current MFE budget erm is £0. Fundamentally, all you need is a well-organised spreadsheet that can be shared. Google docs to the rescue. We have 3 spreadsheets.

1. MFE Features
2. MFE Bugs
3. MFE Sprints

The first 2 sheets are fairly similar and contain a list of features and bugs with priorities against each. Each item has a unique number against it so it can be tracked.

The sprints spreadsheet has a tab for each sprint. The sprint will contain a list of features/bugs for that 2-week sprint. There is also a tab to log how many story points were achieved in each sprint. Setting out 2 weeks’ worth of work is a good way of ensuring the project is moving forward. A sprint is a commitment of work that WILL be completed.

Version control

My evolution through the version control system has progressed from CVS->SVN->GIT. Each one offers something over and above its predecessor. GIT has become an industry standard and tools like bitbucket make it even easy to collaborate on projects

What next

In the next post, we’ll look at the database design.