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Closed 11 years ago.
I'm not sure if this an appropriate question for stack overflow. If not, I apologize.
I was wondering if there is any tool for keeping track of different uncompleted tasks in different modules of a project. I'm currently interning at a company and I feel like everytime something cannot be solved immediately, someone asks me to put a 'todo comment', and that task eventually gets forgotten. I was wondering if there's a better way to keep track of stuff like this.
Thanks.
Trac is an issue tracking system that you can use for this purpose, but you have to enter manually each ticket into the system, but once you're get used to it, it is very useful and effective.
Any issue tracker system also works.
Eclipse will keep track of comments with // TODO in it. There is a "tasks" window which will list them all.
I suggest you to use Post-Its for each Task. You can also use Kanban to manage those tasks. It's very easy to learn and adapt to your needs.
You can split a whiteboard into some sections like Backlog (for pending and new tasks), Work in Progress (you limit the number of possible concurrent tasks), Deliver/Deploy (almost done), Done.
If you want a computer tool, there are lots of them. Just google for Kanban software.
http://www.infoq.com/articles/hiranabe-lean-agile-kanban
Lots if IDEs will keep track of // TODO comments if that's the route you want to take.
To keep track of todo items outside of and IDE, you can try ToDoList
It's free.
Pivotal Tracker looks quite nice as project management tool.
Here's the CodeProject link to AbstractSpoon's ToDo List
It sounds like whichever system you're using at the moment (if you're using one at all) does not make to-do lists a priority or put to-dos/tasks in your view every morning that you log in.
Sounds like you need something that:
Allows you to assign different tasks/to-dos to different modules of a project
Keeps an organized view of which task/to-do has been assigned to which project
Sets alerts for each separate to-do/task (due date, percent completed, etc)
Keeps the tasks/to-dos easily viewable (from the dashboard, or put in a prioritized view as soon as you open a project)
A company that I do contract work with, WORKetc, can do all of this. On top of this, they have a huge amount of other project management features, to name a few:
Collaboration on all aspects of a project
Unlimited sub projects
Gantt charts
Project dependancy
Timesheet/milestone billing
To-dos, tasks, easily assignable to specific people/specific projects/specific sub projects, with necessary alerts
The cool thing about WORKetc is on top of being a project managemement tool, WORKetc also has CRM and billing features. It is essentially a total business management platform and that way if you're using other CRM or billing software you can get rid of it entirely, and not have to worry about integrating seperate projects. Even if you don't use these features, I bet its still a better bargain than the majority of the other ones you'll see!
Pricing/website link: http://www.worketc.com/sign_up
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I hope that somebody with more experience (bad or good) can help me out here: I am setting up a project tracked in JIRA. The whole process with user stories, documentation, sprints, workflows, bamboo and fisheye integration, etc. is set up. But now I have a rather administrative question:
Where should developers log their work in meetings, such as stand-ups and retrospectives and for writing specifications (detailed descriptions of user stories to come)? I really cannot see what makes sense here, as I need the developers (obviously) to track this work, too. As far as I can see, the possibilities are:
Separate PROJECT-ADMIN JIRA project with simple, non-agile issues
Separate and parallel sprint with admin tasks
Administrative tasks for each sprint
Other versions??
Option 2 seems very hackish, as parallel sprints are just in a beta-stage for the JIRA agile (former Greenhopper) module. Option 3 seems a bit much work to setup for each sprint, and I am not sure, how this influences my velocity (ideally, I want to see the possible amount of story points that can be achieved in a sprint). Option 1 seems the most reasonable to me, but others have advised against it, unfortunately, without offering a solution. I haven't really looked into option 4, as IMHO this is very similar to option 2.
I couldn't see any best practices anywhere, so I would very much welcome any advice from more experienced people. Thank you very much.
We use Tempo to log our billable work against JIRA issues, whether a single Epic for a small project or individual tasks for a larger project. For non-billable work we have a single project where people can optional log work, and we also use it for planning our time. So option 1 is the closest there. We could also have categories for different work logged in Tempo and handle this case that way.
So I face this exact issue with my team and this is what is working for us (for now) YMMV.
Our current structure is that we have a Roadmap type project (call this Planning) where all issues come into at first. Thereafter we create issues in related product projects (call this Product).
In the beginning of the lifecycle, any meetings, scoping, etc will have sub-tasks created and the time will be tracked on Planning. Once scoped and scheduled for work a new issue is created on Product and linked to this original issue.
Once the Product issue is assigned and the dev is called to any meetings whilst this issue is in a sprint we will create a sub-task on Product and assign the time. If the issue is not in a sprint we go ahead and create a new sub-task in Planning and assign the time there.
When then also have a project where we do Housekeeping type work. So if we need changes to JIRA, Stash, Confluence we will create the issues here. We will then create a new issue on Planning, link the issue and schedule that accordingly.
We have a meta project that acts as a bucket for anything that doesn't fall into the other categories which we sift through every now and again to identify if we need to create separate projects.
I have created a custom field that rolls up all the times of any linked issues found on the Planning board
Have a look at the Twitter blog Visualizing Epics and Dependencies in JIRA by Nicholas Muldoon maybe this can help you in some way too.
One caveat we are still exploring the best way to do this. Each environment is different and what works for us might not work for you.
I have faced the same issue trying to track team member hours that are unrelated to the project or related to the project but not to a specific story or task.
Initially we went with option 3 & had several administration tasks that persisted across sprints. While this was relatively easy to implement it failed for us as we had team members that sat across multiple projects & as a result these administrative tasks that resided in each project were impossible to manage / report on for these team members.
In the end we went with what you have described as option 1. By creating a separate project with "non task related" issues such as Planning Meetings, Technical Issues & Client work then installing the JIRA Misc Time Log & Report Extensions plugin we could provide users with an easy means of logging times without having to change projects or boards (since the plugin adds a dropdown menu to the top navigation).
The plugin then allowed us to get reports on where team members we logging time off project regardless of how many projects they worked on concurrently.
I was having the same issue, and I know some time has passed since the moment this question was posted but maybe this is useful for a lot of people:
Tempo has a dedicated feature for that thing you want to achieve and is called Internal Issues. not to be confused with Internal activities.
You can go there by navigating to Config>System and then click on the add-ons tab. Then scroll down to the Tempo section in the menu on the left bar and there you'll find a link that reads Internal Issues. There you can create the issues. Please keep in mind that before creating internal issues you have to create the tasks, for instance "Sprint Planning" or "Retrospective" in the project without assigning to anyone, just to the project.
When your users go to log their time for those "Internal Issues" they go to Tempo > Timesheets and then click in the upper right button that reads log work. There, in the right menu they'll see the "internal issue" option where they can pick those internal issues you previously created and log the time that the team spend on SCRUM Ceremonies.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm a bit confused about a pull request I did on a fairly large open source project I use in my work. I won't reveal the project, but it contains a large collection of mostly user submitted scripts that are used to monitor various aspects of a mission critical system or application. I found a user-submitted shell script that I needed to use for my own work, but it had several major bugs, and was stylistically a wreck. I fixed the bugs, and refactored almost the entire script, bringing it up to a fairly clean "bash form". I did a pull request on the script, and the project lead rejected the patch with quote:
"This is mostly coding style changes. Your effort is really
appreciated, but we won't get anywhere if we start accepting that kind
of patches. Please try to focus on the matter, i.e. stuff which really
needs fixing. Thanks!"
Here's an example of a bash coding style change for readability I made throughout the script:
- start_time=`date +%s%N`
+ start_time=$(date +%s%N)
Is this common on open source projects? Most projects I've committed to were my own, and I refactor stylistically bad code all the time. If code will be used by other people like the script in question, shouldn't a usability refactor be welcomed? I'm just a bit confused, as the project has no coding style guides.
Did you split the patches so that the bugs are fixed first and the style changes made later? If not, I'd reject the patch as well. A patch that changes logic should be as small and self-contained as possible. Nobody wants to go through dozens of style changes to ensure they have no effect on the logic when trying to understand what you fixed.
This is absolutely not a universal thing among open-source projects. I'll just give one counterexample, from a recent pull request:
https://github.com/djcb/mu/pull/65
My pull request related to the Emacs component of mu, called mu4e. My only changes were to make many more variables from the project available to edit via M-x customize (the Emacs equivalent of "Edit -> Preferences", or "Tools -> Options"). There were no changes to any of the program logic at all. As you can see, the pull request was merged without any fuss after just two hours. (I had never contributed to this project before, so I didn't get fast-tracked based on my past contributions or anything like that.) So that's one example of a pull request of only cosmetic changes that got happily accepted without any complaint.
As to why the project in question rejected your patch, maybe they're just being stubborn or too proud to let someone else mess around in their code or something like that, but on the other hand, there are valid reasons not to merge cosmetic non-user-facing changes. If they accept your code and they are at least minimally responsible, they will have to at least look at all the changes you're making and make sure you didn't break something, and make sure that your code changes match what your commit log says that you changed. I'm guessing that your pull request changed a whole bunch of isolated lines or blocks throughout many files, right? That's probably what you'd end up with if you did a blanket search and replace of backticks with $(). That kind of patch can be hard to verify, because you look at the same change on line after line and your eyes glaze over and you miss the one case where the close-paren is missing which causes the entire project to break.
The point is that even though you're giving them code for free, actually merging your code is not free, and the work involved in integrating your code into the project must be done by the people who run the project, or else they will be merging code that they can't trust. In some cases, the people who own the project may look at what your changes claim to improve and make the rational decision that those improvements do not justify the effort required to merge your code in a responsible way. If you disagree, you're free to create your own fork (not a "hostile" fork, just a run-of-the-mill "Project X with my customizations" fork) and put your changes there, and use them yourself. If your changes are really worth having, people might start switching to your fork, at which point the original developers might reconsider their position and merge your changes after all.
Each project has its own rules and guidelines. You've been told that this project works to different rules from the ones you'd work to. If you want to contribute, it sounds like you'll have to follow their rules. (I tend to be on your side in the debate — but when I'm not in charge, I go by the rules of those who are!)
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Do you need a project management system if you work alone? I mean a project management system that includes issue tracking, wiki, etc.
Currently I keep my issues in a very good organizer software and I keep project documentation in Word files (and of course I have a version control system), so I am not really sure if I need a project management software, because I work alone.
One useful thing, I can think of, that project management system can additionally give me is linking issues with commits (UPDATE: I've found this feature useful enough: for example, right now I am creating documentation for the new release of my project and I consequently open every issue with "Pending for release" status, then I read the issue's description and then I can quickly view the diff of the commit for this issue - this helps me to see details and write better documentation).
Another one - sharing issues so your users or your employer can view or manage them.
What am I missing? Is project management software necessary when working as the only programmer?
UPDATE: I've thought up another useful thing: In comments we can give a link to an issue or a wiki article with detailed information about the code being commented.
You say you use some organizer software that helps you managing issues. So you already have your custom project management system. Just keep it.
Project management systems does not have to be big, support sharing data or other kinds of documentation. As a programmer you are supposed to use one to make your work organized, but it doesn't matter which one. You can happily use plain text files if they work for you.
Still, if there is even a slight chance that you'll be cooperating with someone, you should try something that allows cooperation... just to know how they work.
Do you need a project management system if you work alone?
Yes.
Currently I keep my issues in a very good organizer software and I keep project documentation in Word files (and of course I have a version control system).
See. You have a project management system. Why ask?
project management system can additionally give me is linking issues with commits.
That's not necessarily project management. You can easily do that with you version control software.
Read this: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/issuetrackers.html
sharing issues so your users or your employer can view or manage them.
That means you're not working alone, if you're sharing something. What are you asking for here? How to share?
When working alone is the key thought to pursue here. When you are alone, you don't have the luxury of having someone else to keep you on your toes. A good "system" is essential therefore in order to help you manage your projects. As to which system to employ, that all comes down to your individual needs, and how much time you want to spend maintaining such a system.
If there is any possibility that you will need to involve someone else, then you need to decide if the system you use will scale to meet your changing requirements. This is also true if you continue to work alone and your workload changes.
As for software, that is almost another question entirely. I personally prefer to use a software tool to track all of my tasks, and to help me to collate data that helps me to determine priorities and task scheduling. That is in a nutshell what project management is all about. When working at home on my own projects, I use a simple Redmine configuration to manage different types of projects. Planning for programming projects, working out the logistics for my wedding, even managing my house renovations. All have been added to my private Redmine setup because I'm too lazy to try and keep paper-diary styled systems updated. At work, I have a more complex configuration to manage the myriad of programming projects we have here, and to manage the dependencies between them.
I've found though, that the most important thing is to ensure that the processes are streamlined, and that the supporting tool can be configured to match the processes. You don't want to have to change your processes because the tool isn't up to par. Also, the tool should not become the sole focus of all of your efforts, therefore it should be configured to reduce the "red-tape" side of things. You only want to capture enough information to describe your tasks, and to determine when they need to be done, who will do them, and when they are completed. Yes, your needs may require more information to be captured, but always try to minimise this, as you don't want to feel like you are always updating your project management tool when you'd rather be working on that latest killer algorithm you've been looking forward to doing! ;-)
I would not want to work without a system like trac anymore, even if I'm the only one working on the project. You should use a version control system of course, no question about that. Then there are two or three things coming up, you also mentioned.
First is documentation. There are lots of different possibilities and a wiki is just one of it. I personally use the wiki mostly for ideas, thoughts and notes. It's easy to put drawings in it, link to ressources in the web and really quickly edit. This can not replace in code documentation you do with source comments or tools like doxygen. And this can also not replace a manual, if the project requires one.
The second thing you'll come across is some kind of todos, let it be bug reports (even from yourself), feature requests, things like that. You can put them as comments in your code or use a list in a text file or your PIM system, but you can also use a ticket system, just to keep track of what you want to or have to do in the project in the future. You can not do everything just now.
Third is the bigger plan, this is not just atomic todos but things trac calls milestones. This has to be written down somewhere.
The great thing about trac now is, you can integrate all these thing you have to do anyway in one tool and even cross link between all the parts. Link to code lines from a ticket, reference tickets in a commit message, use ressources from your repository in the wiki, automatically build doxygen and integrate it and so on. You must decide if you want to use trac for all the things around your project or something else, but you have these things anyway so why not use a system integrating it all? ;-)
I mean a project management system that includes issue tracking, wiki, etc.
I don't use an Issue Tracker, but I practice continuous (not "big bang") integration, and I test (look for bugs) early and often, and I fix any bugs as soon as I find them, so that list of known Issues remains small.
I also have a lot of structure in the source code (e.g. separate projects/assemblies for separate components), so I try to have "the code is the documentation".
The table at What Types of Documents Should You Create? implies that you may not need documentation (e.g. a wiki), unless you're working with other people: e.g. with a manager, testers, and/or end-users.
You may be the only programmer now but will it stay that way forever? I often work alone on development projects but I still track the "to do" list and issues in a simple Access database. Makes it much easier if you need to expand/hand over a project.
You absolutely do, at least for a bigger projects that take a few months. For the past years I tried :
eclipse notepad plugin - just text file - effective
eclipse mylyn tasks - better, enough for one-man-show, but I was still having issues with migration between eclipse instances
youtrack is free and it's like a JIRA but more simple and practical for an individualist
With notepad I was able to focus on current task, but I wasn't able to maintain long term iterations, because without issue tracker I was loosing discipline, dealing with 3 tasks at the same time, not finishing them, etc.
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My company has been using JIRA as a requirements tracking tool as well as a bug tracker, and it's been working pretty well while we've been working on one project at a time.
We now have a scenario where we have three different project proposals whose requirements partially overlap (e.g. requirement 1 applies to projects A and B, requirement 2 applies to projects B and C, etc.). I'd like to be able to enter a single JIRA issue for each requirement, but that doesn't appear to be possible since JIRA issues and projects have a one-to-one relationship.
Has anyone found a way to do this in JIRA, or maybe with some other tool that integrates with JIRA ?
While there's no single correct answer, I can offer an idea. I don't have enough information about your work process, but you mention that you have project proposals. So I'm assuming projects A, B and C are in early stages. Requirements gathering and such, no bugs yet.
Set up a single JIRA project, say, "Early Requirements". Put all the requirements for projects A, B and C into that JIRA project. To allow many-to-many relationship between requirements and real projects, set up a custom field of type "multiple checkboxes" or equivalent, and configure "project A", "project B" and "project C" as its values. For any requirement you can check which project it applies to.
Now - and I am making more assumptions here - let's say some proposals move on and some die away. You will need a process to a) extract all the requirements for real project A into a newly created JIRA project for A - this can be done via search & bulk clone issue; b) purge all requirements that have no live project associated with them - search & bulk delete.
Caveats: if you need to share requirements with different customers, it will get tricky. Permissions are configured per JIRA project & issue type.
Having said all that, JIRA lacks features for decent requirements management, such as baselines and traceability. But it may be ok for just collecting data for further work.
We use the "duplicates" or "relates to" function of jira.
So you raise an issue in each project, but you relate them together. That way you can have one issue "owned" by a project and you can close out all related projects once the changes are tested on each.
You could even use depends on linkage if this makes sense in your project setup.
We have the same problem. In the case where you have an issue (a bug or new feature) which involves multiple products and that have dependencies between them. (As an example lets say we have a server, a connection api and a client application). If there is a new idea about extending the client application in a certain way, it is quite possible that also the connection api and server need some kind of extension. Probably they are developed by different teams... So not handled in the same sprint / iteration, but as a product owner you want to keep track of all these new features as a group.
What we did was actually created a few custom fields. The first field we introduced was a 'Cascading Select', as 'Program' and 'Phase'. This gives the product owners the possibility to group the issues under a program and do some rough long term planning (several iterations).
Then we added another field (Text Field) for 'Epic' (or 'Theme') this bundles the issues related to a certain Epic / Theme. The idea is to use 'Epics' within a 'Program'. In case of an larger 'Program', you can probably separate it into different parts, which then get reflected in these 'Epics'. (A kind of storyline. A group of stories (which can spread over multiple products) which add value as a hole to the series of products).
Both fields make it now easy to filtering out issues, that cross multiple products, based on Program (with or without its Phase) and the Epic.
Indeed with linking enabled, you can now also create dependencies between the different issues, in the different products. And it is completely separated from default Jira product versioning. Which is great, so the normal release process stays as it is.
Another idea I'm thinking about to introduce is the field 'Iteration'. When going into the planning session (or just after it). This field could be updated with the name of that sprint (Jira is great in multiple issue editing / updating). Which then makes it easy to filter out all the issues for that sprint.
What I like most about using Jira also as a Scrum planning / Sprint tracking tool, is that you do not have a separate planning and backlog tool. Bugs are more visible. No double administration of bugs into planning tool and or planning items into Bug tracking tool (for the correct cvs/svn/etc commit numbers). Or the generation of release notes.
You're probably better of using confluence in addition to jira, in this case.
Use Jira for what it's best at, and use Confluence for everything else.
Divide your various projects into shared "sub modules" if you feel that is useful, however I would be inclined to suggest using Jira mostly for tracking actual implementation and associated bugs.
Another approach is create a multi-select custom field with hyper links (like 'XYZ-123') to issues as options.
Better way is to distinguish issues used for development tracking and requirements that often are the same at 80% for all your projects.
Solution exists: Rmsis a JIRA plugin:
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Closed 10 years ago.
We use MKS Integrity for our source control. I have no control over that -- I just have to use it.
What are some "gotchas" that I should know about and avoid? And, are there any neat things about the software that will allow me to use it better?
I've already hit cases where the tree structure in the source control doesn't match that in my sandbox. In more than one case, a file exists in two places, and when I resynchronize, I get the current version, and then an older version overwrites it, and then it is no longer synchronized. It's a challenge to find the older file, since, of course, the tree structure doesn't match.
I have used Source Control since 1999. It's pretty reliable, we have never lost change history. We don't do anything fancy with branches so I can't answer your question.
I assume you did resynchronize (F6) and update to head (F7).
SI is built upon a command-line design. You might have more consistent results if you use the command-line versions (pj.exe etc). The documentation is not trivial.
We're trying to migrate to Subversion, because MKS want ridiculous money for their latest enterprisey version.
Just discovered this MKS gotcha: It only allows one revision of a member to have a specific label on it at a time.
Came across it this way:
Someone on our team renamed a pdf resource, adding _Old to the file name (he did this rather than dropping it because he wanted it to still be part of our deployments)
Then he added the new version of the pdf, adding it to the same archive so that it connects to the existing revision history graph.
Now, if you look at the revision history for that member, you'll find that there are two revisions of the same member being used by the same dev path.
As part of our deployment process, we checkpoint the artifacts that are being deployed, applying labels to members to specify the release that they're a part of.
Since MKS only applies a label to one revision, when I went to review the checkpoint, it looked like the new pdf was not included in our deployment because it was missing the label
Also, AVOID VISUAL STUDIO INTEGRATION!!! Since installing it, several members of my team have had to wrestle with frequent visual studio crashes, and apparently its branching mechanisms depend on features that have no equivalent within the integrity command line or gui client. So if anyone on your team uses visual studio integration, unless the branches they work in were created through the integration, they will not work. So you'll find yourself stuck doing things in visual studio that visual studio does slowly and poorly just so that the team members using the integration can work with it.