#Crowdsmart dev process & tools
This is a first shot at formalizing the development process.
We don't have an office and are geographically dispersed, thus we have to rely on tools for organizing and tracking tasks, team collaboration and communication.
We cannot rely on email when communicating about product features, milestones, goals, status, assignments.
The goal is to funnel all work through a project management tool. There're a number of tools out there. I heard good things about Blossom and it seems to be simple enough, so let's give it a shot.
Go to Blossom
##Project Management
Blossom
Blossom gives each member of the team clear overview about who’s doing what & why and at the same time it helps you to focus on what matters most. With Blossom you can efficiently manage your whole development process in one place, built with simplicity in mind. Blossom is based on the principles of Kanban, a way of working that emphasizes iterative delivery cycles and continuously improves the workflow of your team or organization. Blossom keeps project management as lightweight & easy as possible and goes out of your way so you can focus on the fun part.
Blossom is based on the principles of Kanban
Kanban is a way for teams & organizations to visualize their work. Every team member immediately gets overview who’s doing what and can easily identify and eliminate bottlenecks. Kanban is about continuously improving your process and the way you manage the flow of work, rather than managing team members and their work. Every member of the team and the team as a whole benefits from Kanban. Teams reduce waste by setting the optimal amount of work they can handle at one time which leads to a smooth & continuous workflow. Hence, you can automatically give greater focus to fewer tasks and achieve higher product quality to eventually provide greater value to the customer.
More reads:
###OK, let's jump right in
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Find blossom invite in your email and sign up. If you didn't get it, please ask Fred to invite you.
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Important: Go to Gravatar and create a gravatar with the same email you use for blossom. Blossom uses people pics a lot.
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Login to blossom.io and go to MVP project. First things to notice:
- Focus tag line under project name. That's what's currently most important, urgent. Click to edit. I added: defining road map, understanding scope.
- Your gravatar pic should appear in upper right corner, these are the team members.
- A link to the Roadmap (external Google doc). The roadmap defines the scope of the MVP. The scope is defined in form of high level Use Cases. Tom, Fred, please take a look. I gave it a shot but I should not own it. We all do. Anything we want to see in the MVP needs to be captured here. This is also a good place to define milestones. There is no particular format to this doc, so feel free to add whatever works for you.
- Project stages
Project stages are expressed in columns. They are:
- on deck: New tasks/features/bugs, basically any actionable item goes here first.
- in progress: Items that are currently being worked on.
- done (in dev): Items that are done but not yet available for testing
- in test/demo: Items that made it to the demo system and are ready for testing
That's a starting point. I'm open to refine and add stages as we progress
- Task Cards
Individual tasks, features, bugs (basically anything actionable) is expressed as a card. Cards have to be created on deck. I created a few cards, click on a card to see its content:
- Name of task. I use prefix UX and Core to distinguish backend and frontend
- A one liner that describes why this task is important
- A checklist with people who are concerned with this task
- Any number of comments that provide more detail, specification, requirements.
- Collaborators who work on the task
Cards are rank ordered. Cards on top have priority over lower cards. TBD who decides priorities. Tom? Fred? All of us?
- Workflow
In order to start working on a task, drag it to the *in progress column. When done, drag it to 'done' column.
Let's start there. We have to think a bit more about the release process and how to use remaining stages.