Today's pairwork session was largely spent working on the project's Readme and time log. It was quite interesting as we discovered new ways to manage our project and tasks more efficiently. I'll talk about the tools that we are currently using to help us.
Firstly, there's this cute website called Trello. It is basically a to-do list manager at its core. In Trello, you first create a Board. This board, which is a container for the entire project, holds Lists. Lists are general aspects of the project that should be focused on. For example, we have a list called "Features For This Sprint" that holds tasks. These tasks are wrapped in Cards, which the lists contain. The cards are the most detailed components; they can hold the task descriptions, additional checklists and activity history. Furthermore, the entire board can be made public for viewing, and shared among team members who are given editing privileges. It was pretty intuitive to use and we hope that it would serve us well throughout this project.
Our Trello Board can be found at this link.
This was overlooked by us, somewhat, but Google Docs Spreadsheet is a pretty good tool for keeping a time log. We were inspired to use this when we saw the sample readme. It is pretty efficient now, especially since we can sort by date, but I don't know whether it will become hard to use when there are more and more entries. It's getting a little hard to read even now. Our time log sheet can be found here.
Of course, there's this blog. We intend to update this blog regularly with our thoughts and reflections about the things we have learnt along the way. This will allow us to track our learning process and also for posterity's sake. Additionally, the blog has customizable sidebars that can hold to-do lists and other information. However now with the Trello and Spreadsheet, those sidebars may not come in handy as much. Another reason for setting up the blog is so that we may experiment with any HTML/CSS/JS that we learnt in mission controls, but so far we have not been focusing on that.
We use git as our version control tool, and Github as the online repository service so that we can share code among ourselves. Encountered problems with binary files differing during a merge, but that is because we did not set up the gitignore file properly.
Lastly, team communication is mostly text messaging and regular meetups in school. These methods have served us well thus far, so I highly recommend them to all other teams.
Thanks for reading!
Nick
Orbital Programme 2014
