Thread

Looks like you just thought of another project for yourself (if only you had some PMS to track all your projects 😛)
So what features do you need in your TODO list on steroids?
I’m thinking even my planned task module will be overkill for your needs, it’ll have (not confirmed, but probably):
- A list of tasks (duh!)
- Nested lists
- Priorities (either custom or low/medium/high/none)
- Assign to users
- Set due dates
- Time tracking
- And more…

Looks like you just thought of another project for yourself

Sure does. If this was paid employment, I’d be set for years! I think if anything, I need an FPMS (Future Project Management System)

(if only you had some PMS to track all your projects 😛)

I get enough PMS from my girlfriend. But yes, I definitely need something.

So what features do you need in your TODO list on steroids?
I’m thinking even my planned task module will be overkill for your needs, it’ll have (not confirmed, but probably):
- A list of tasks (duh!)
- Nested lists
- Priorities (either custom or low/medium/high/none)
- Assign to users
- Set due dates
- Time tracking
- And more…

All that seems very relevant to me, it all depends on what the “And more…” is. Is making a cup of coffee in there somewhere? (Sorry)...

Unfortunatly, no coffee
The and more is how it links in with other parts of the system
Such as time tracking, comments and messages, files etc

Sounds good to me. I think what I’ve been getting at is that commercial PMSs seem to be aimed quite specifically at group management. What I’d like is everything related to groups hidden away for single users.

Glad you mentioned that, because I neglected to mention it
It will be context aware… what this means is, the options you get depend on the number of users in your account, on the project, if you select a client etc

So if you’re the only user in the account and create a project, you don’t get any of the screens to add more users to the project (although that willa ppear if you add more users to the account)

If you create a project without a client, it assumes its an intenal project, and subtle UI changes take place etc

Another beefit of this, is you can freely move between accounts and projects, and everything changes with you, instead of having to log out of one account into another

The only PMS I’ve ever used was basecamp (and only a little) and even though you say it’s one of the easier (or feature lite) PMSs, I still found it a little clunky and not fun to use.  I do admit I have very little experience with it, but my take on it is that since a developer has to work on the actual project with or without a PMS, all the work of using a PMS is extra work.  For this reason, I think a PMS should be SUPER easy, maybe even ALL AJAX driven, so the user only needs to see one page.  It should feel as light as notepad.

So for making a task list, I would find it easy to have a textarea where I could just type all my tasks and hit ‘GO’, and the app would make an unordered list out of each line item which could then be sorted freely for priority.  Adding and removing tasks would need to be just as easy.

I think that would be great if it functioned like a one man tool for the single developer.  The main reason I haven’t used many PMSs is that I’ve never worked with a group, only using basecamp because a client made an account for me in their project.

I think the UI is probably the biggest place where your PMS could outshine others, simplifying usage to the maximum.

Gary,
You say all the PMS stuff is extra work, you mean you don’t track what needs to be done and communicate with the client etc some other way when not using a formal PMS? (But I agree using a PMS is more work in most cases.

Your example of adding tasks leads back to what we where discussing before, about the super intelligent textarea widget in the sidebar, so if you type

- do something
  - do something else
- do something fun
26/05 client meeting

it will create the nested todo list, and add client meeting to your calendar as a milestone

This is the area desktop widgets bring it into a new class, as something like the time tracking todo list widget we talked about earlier would encourage use, as its much easier then opening a browser, logging in and then doing something with your tasks

And I just had an idea (its a specific example, but you get the point)
I wonder if it would be possible to hook into Eclipse, and add the // TODO tags to your todo list? Same for netbeans (I assume MS Visual Studio has something similar?)

Keep it simple, that’s all that I ask.

Keep it simple, that’s all that I ask.

Yeah, I think thats one of the biggest problems, or should I say most interesting challenges 😉
Balancing the simplicity with functionality

Being simple isn’t the goal.  Having a clean, simple, easy and intuitive UI is the goal.  You really good at UI, Dam1an?

Being simple isn’t the goal.  Having a clean, simple, easy and intuitive UI is the goal

Yeah thats what I meant by simple lol
And I’m reasonable good at UI design (but by no means amazing)... got a few good ideas of how to keep the UI nice and clean/intuiative/simple but still highly functional

While this is more so on the change request side of project management, I would love something that automatically pushes approved code changes to another environment.

IE contact.php has been through code review and approved. File is grabbed from development (or testing), this can be setup and defined, and pushed up to the production server. (Most likely done with FTP).

This could definitely be my lazy side speaking. But in an enterprise environment, the developers do not have access to production, only change control does. If at all possible, change control should not even have FTP access to production. Let the software manage all of this.

Thanks for the idea Drewbee
And it may well be your lazy side speaking, but chances are, you’re not the only lazy dev, a lot of people are just as lazy and will find this a great feature (even non lazy programmers will find this useful)

You talk about permissions and access to the production server, if they’re that restrictive, would they trust some web app which isn’t even hosted on their own servers to have access?

I think this could work as a long term goal for 2 reasons
1. It’s not core functionality, and will be dependant on lots of other stuff
2. By being a long term goal, the system would have hopefully gained some credability, so they might trust it

Yeah—enterprise is especially restricted. The hole Sarbanes-Oxley and separation of duties is huge, especially when you are talking corporate companies. I know when I worked at McGraw-Hill as a Business Analyst, code was always migrated by the management software. From Dev > Staging > Quality > Production. A little bit of a different setup, as it was all Java based, but the idea I’m sure is the same. We could move it from dev > Staging but change control had to move it to quality & production, and this was all permissions driven (of course). This eliminated a lot of purpose for access to the production environment to be spread around, except to a select few key individuals.

And yes, you are right. This type of system setup is dependent on a lot of other items, and has a lot of building/exceptions/testing to go through before it could be trusted. I think this was mentioned elsewhere, but interfacing with SVN might be an awesome way to go about setting this up as well.

I know this isn’t coming to conception anytime soon, but it would be recomended that you set up ‘sources’. These sources are where the files are pulled / put from. I ready somewhere earlier in the thread about someone mentioning interfacing with SVN. This could also be a source, as well as ftp access.

I know for me, I develop locally, commit changes, then push to a staging environment.

For this setup, you would develop locally, commit the changes, then have the system look for any changed files (and select which ones of course)... and have it push it to whatever the next source is. It gives a little bit more integration between the different environments and SVN in my opinion.

But i’ll stop letting my thoughts flow, as I am really awesome at creating scope creep 😊