During the development of ACME, myself and Andrew struggled with using YouTrack to keep an eye on progress, and when looking at the Agile Board the clutter made it very difficult to monitor progress.
So I went off piste and setup a couple of boards on Trello to see what Andrew made of it all. I’ve run a number of projects from Trello and it’s been a good experience.
What was the goal?
We wanted a lightweight process that allowed the server and the app side of the project to communicate easily, with the tool fading into the background. The most important thing was that this process did not impinge on development time while maintaining high status visibility.
Note: this is a what worked for us, I do not claim it to be a full project management solution.
Why not use YouTrack?
The following were the main reasons I decided to try an alternative:
- Visibility of Progress – it was difficult to judge progress as the nature of the YouTrack UI made it difficult to see what was happening.
- Project History – a simple way to review what was done and when.
- Questions Bucket – a lack of a place where questions could be recorded in proximity to the project tasks.
- Mobile App – when I’m on the move, a dedicated mobile experience is essential.
What’s Trello?
Trello is a collaborative work platform. It does this via teams, boards, lists, and cards.
The ACME Process
As mentioned I created two boards:
- ACME Daily
- ACME Daily Archive
ACME Daily
The ACME Daily board is the main destination for our daily workflow. Within this board we have the following lists:
- Today
- Yesterday
- Maybe Tomorrow
- Questions
Today
Each morning we create a new list for Today, and name it after the day and date e.g. Thursday - 17th November. We then populate that list with the tasks we think we will get through that day.
Yesterday
This is the list of tasks that were completed on the previous day. It is also named after the day and date. It’s a quick scannable way to review the previous days work. If any items in the list have not been completed, we move them into the Today list.
Maybe Tomorrow
We also populate the Maybe Tomorrow with tasks which we think we’ll get to tomorrow (or at least in the near future). This is also a source for populating the Today list each morning.
Questions
If there are any topcis that we need further information on we create a card in this list and update it as we get information.
ACME Daily Archive
This is the archive of the tasks we’ve completed. Each morning we move the Yesterday list from the ACME Daily board to this list. This is a complete archive of all the tasks that have been completed for the project.
ACME Card Labels
Trello has support to label cards too. We used the following labels:
- Doing – an orange label
- Done – a green label
- Invalid – a black label
This allows to see daily progress at a glance.
Per-card Checklists
A card can have a checklist (or multiple checklists) if you think a card is not granular enough. This means you can break a task down into subtasks, and again progress is immediately scannable.
Possible Enhancements
Calendar
Trello has a Calendar Add-On. If we add Due Dates to cards they will appear in the calender view.
Slack Integration
Trello has a rather excellent Slack add-on which we could also use. I didn’t introduce the Slack integration for ACME, as I wanted to test the process first.