Re: Project management software

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 7:54 PM, Lukas <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Emil,
>
> Well, KDE is not an organization.
>
> But KDE e.V. is
>
> So there is no way you can force KDE
>>
> Force? Never had such idea :)
>
> Also, you cant assign tasks
>
> It's more like self-assigning, like in bugzilla
>
>
>> and ask for reports from kde developers.
>>
> reports are done automatically
>
> Also, as far as i can see, kde developers are happy about their current
>> workflow (bugs.kde.org for managing issues and bugs, mailing list for
>> discussions and irc for real time discussions) and they are already going
>> through a huge change to their workflow (svn to git migration).
>>
> Each tool is made for different tasks. PMS has its own (but some overlaps,
> of course).
>
> The reason, why I even started thinking about PMS, is the promo itself
> (suggesting to apply to entire KDE community was a bit premature) - as far
> as I know, mailing lists + wiki are the mail tools used here.
>
> In such work flow, PMS fits well. teamworkpm.net offers free service for 2
> projects. Enough for medium sized team?
>
> So will there be interest of trying any PMS service? If it wouldn't gain
> any benefits - I'll be the first to voter for dropping it
>

Hi Lukas,

I'm thinking that as some others have pointed out, we already have a lot of
tools in place for things like code management, feature/bug tracking, and
communication.  However I do agree with you that having some sort of tool
that helps keep other types of projects on track could be handy.  I'm
thinking stuff like planning for major conferences (akademy, camp kde, etc)
or for managing the launch of things like our "Join the game" campaign.
 Those are situations where we have a need that doesn't really fit in the
context of these other tools.  I suppose you could "manage" a project on a
wiki but obviously that requires a lot of work to setup all the pages to
track the tasks and do all the things that project management software could
do.

So I see a few potential ways to move your idea forward.

1) As Ingo mentioned there is a very strong preference towards Free Software
(not just as in beer), but we have used proprietary options when nothing
else is available.  Our heavy reliance on Google docs comes to mind, though
we now have Etherpad as a Free option (though only for plain text docs
really - no spreadsheets/databases/etc).  Anyways one idea would be to
approach Claudia Rauch (the KDE e.V. office manager) to see if she might
find something like this useful.  I could see some potential benefit to the
types of projects that she works on along with the e.V. interns who are
hired to help her out.  They're not typically doing any coding, but instead
are working on more traditional business projects on the e.V.'s behalf.

2) Another potential opportunity would be for you to get involved in the
planning process of the conferences I mentioned and then utilize one of
these project management tools to help keep everyone organized.  E.g. you
decide to help with the Desktop Summit planning stuff (I'm not sure how far
along that is exactly) and tell the group that you're willing to track all
the tasks for them and collect information on their intended due dates and
dependencies.  You will certainly not be able to tell other people they have
to use it, but if you do the leg work to setup the software with that type
of information for them and make it a valuable resource then I think you'll
find that organizers would eventually participate in using it as well out of
pure convenience.

3) In a perfect world, you might even consider taking your experience with
something like #2 above and then using it to build requirements out for a
Free Software implementation of this type of tool.  Then all you'd need to
do is find a developer or two that found your project planning assistance
helpful and see if you can convince them to take action towards building it
:)

Hope that is helpful.  Let me know if you want contact info to discuss with
Claudia.  She would be a good person to let you know how the DS planning is
going as well in case you'd like to help with that.

-Justin


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