Project management planning: initial meeting

Gantt chart

Today a few of us had a Zoom call about our strategy for project management in ClassicPress, including how we can better organize our open issues list to reflect progress and show others where they can contribute.

As always, remaining to-do items from this meeting are marked in green.

Thanks to Patrice Embry for joining us and helping us plan our project management strategy, with the goals of making it easier for people to see what state the project is in, while not adding too much extra work for developers.

We started by looking at an issue on the APIs repository and its linked issue on the ClassicPress repository.  We decided that neither of these issues was actionable as-is, so I’ve closed them both with a progress update and split out remaining items into smaller issues.

We also realized that we need better organization and discoverability for our project board.  If you’re on the main ClassicPress repository, the “Projects” tab used to say “0 Projects” because the project is actually under the ClassicPress organization (one “level up” on GitHub).  This is good, because it allows us to accumulate tasks from multiple repositories into the same board, but it wasn’t very easy to figure out what was going on.  For now, I’ve added a “dummy” project board that just links back to the real one:

GitHub projects

GitHub new project

GitHub project board

Patrice volunteered to write up a proposed workflow for working on GitHub issues.

Once we have something written up for this, we’ll put the guide on docs.classicpress.net as part of a larger guide for contributing to the project.

I went through all open issues on the ClassicPress repository and assigned a milestone (v1.0.0-alpha1, v1.0.0-beta1, or v1.0.0) to most issues, and all the rest either have an “action label” like close (recommend for closing), or a request for clarification or next steps.

On the project board, Patrice will split the “To Do” column into “Backlog” and “Current Sprint” so that we have a better view of what is actually up next (what we are currently focused on). The items in “Current Sprint” should be pretty closely correlated with our “current” milestone. We’re not planning to use a strict scrum-like sprint structure, but the “Backlog” vs “Current Sprint” split on the project board can be updated approximately every 2 weeks.

This is a volunteer project, and I’m sure that our project management strategy will continue to evolve.  Please join us in Slack to help!

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About James Nylen

I'm an American software developer with over 18 years of experience working with code. I like to keep software projects simple. They naturally tend to get complicated, but it helps to deeply understand and plan what we're working on.