I've recently been put in charge managing a software project.Until now we didn't really follow any paradigm and just worked hard and made sure progress was made and deadlines met. The CEO liked Gannt charts and critical path analysis to understand potential risks and consequences of delays on some tasks due to dependencies. He is willing to give things like Burndown charts a try, there re definitively some benefits for us. E.g., we can rarely work 100% on a given task so something might get worked on in fragments for 2-3weeks but only take 4-5 days total effort. Plus you get the usual issues of difficulty in a accurately estimating task effort, and requirements changes.
Ideally we are looking for:
Ideally we are looking for:
- An online system that all devs can log in to and add tasks, update completion etc.
- When adding a task with an estimated duration, the estimate can be updated while keeping the original so we know the error.
- Flexibility in assigning the theoretical/nominal work rate. E.g. in theory we are supposed to work 60% of our time on this project, but that can vary form 0-100%. Not least there are things like vacations, sickness and holidays that are nice to account for when estimate "project velocity".
- Tools to help predict project completions/reaching milestones on time. I've seen some burn-down charts stop at the current data with the philosophy you can't predict the future, which just doesn't cut it when you have deadlines. I want to be able to see when our nominal work rate intersects he x-axis, e.g. no more tasks, but also would be nice to be able to model our true work rate. E.g., we supposedly work 60% of our time = 24 hours a week, but lets say the true average is only 19.5 hours a week, and furthermore, we consistently under estimate task effort by 20%. Then our 170 hours of estimated tasks is more like 204hours etc. This goes against the philosophy of some agile types but we aren't doing agile, we need more flexibility combined with actually providing results at deadlines. The deadlines are imaginary, they are critical to the existence of the company. E.g., CES only occurs once a year, we miss that and our company might not even exist for next year.
- Related to the above, how can we model risk in task dependencies. Yes, we try and break things down and work on tasks in parallel but sometimes task A really has to precede task B, perhaps task B is entirely pointless if you can't succeed at task A.. Something graphical would be nice, e.g. make a little dependency tree that can some how integrate with the provides work estimates and task velocity.
- Presenting velocity, work completed in the task week. The CEO and some investors need weekly updates on progress. The Burndown chart is one piece. But I also want a report about high-level tasks. E.g., we might have 5 main taks that we would sub-divide into 4-12 smaller pieces that the engineers need to know about to mange time and measure progress, but management shouldn't care. They want a summary of the 5 tasks. Something showing Hours worked on each task, % completion, predicted completion, current estimated effort, original estimated effort., responsible engineers, comments.
- Things like bug tracking that can integrate with our git repo.
- Easy to use, or lots of good resources for help
- Ideally free or decent free trial so we can determine how much we like it.
- No pretentious BS and stupid naming of common entities - a tasks is a task, a big is bug, and a story is what I read my 2 year old each night.
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