Jeremy’s Little Corner Of The Web…

After a long, long, long wait, Connoisseur 1.2 was finally released. It was a long, long, long time in the making. To give you an indication, I first started re-writing much of the guts of the main interface back in December 2005. However, university, my honours thesis, a full-time work placement and some semblance of a social life got in the way of finishing the rest of it. It's only in the last few months that I've been back at work part-time (rather than in the wee hours after midnight) and have been able to do productive work on Connoisseur.

I thought I'd share something I found really useful in the past month:

That is "the wall", a term I've shamelessly ripped from the crew at Atlassian. Basically, Mat and I wrote any tasks we wanted to get done for the 1.2 release on index cards and put them up on the wall. Tasks written in red were bugs. Some also had issue numbers, where appropriate.

What we did was have one section with uncompleted tasks, and an adjacent portion of the wall with completed tasks. When working on a task (and only one at a time!), I would take it down and put it on my desk. When completed, it's ticked and put in the "completed" section (as shown in the photo).

So… why do this? It's a good indicator of progress. If you can see everything that needs to be done to make a release (or finish the "iteration" you're in), you've got a fair idea of how much work you've got left. I also found it to be a motivator. ("Only two cards left!!!")

The main issue I have is balancing use of the wall and the issue tracker, JIRA. The question when working with tasks on the wall is "do I put them into JIRA?".

I find that putting reported bugs into JIRA useful, as you then have a paper trail and details of the issue. When it's time to work on the bug, I write it on the card (with the issue number).

Enhancements and features are a bit different, though. I've found (in my experience at Atlassian and TLAF) that it's better to put the high-level feature ("Add support for x format recipes") in the issue-tracker, but break that nebuluous and ambigious task into a number of smaller tasks. (e.g. "Write parser for x format ingredients", "Write parser for x format directions") It makes the features much less daunting!

I'd be interested to see ways other people approach software releases!