Scrum or Kanban to make the software development more efficient

R&D
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@cgeek I saw you are using labels such as backlog, done or review within the bugtracker github feature, don’t you use a meta-tool upon it in order to manage the project tasks according to a management method like Scrum or Kanban ? A few months ago I started using Scrum btw, and it works pretty good to keep a constancy in the development flow and more generally in a team dev collaboration.

There are some awesome tools that help this way such as ZenHub (a upper layer on github bugtracker, we keep then using the same basic tools behind), or another very promising one Taiga (very sexy FOSS ;-)).

Of course these techniques need us to keep a constancy in our time management we providing to the project as well. But they help to provide in a regular basis releases of the software.

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I am using Huboard for ucoin, since very recently.

I have just tried ZenHub, very nice tool :wink: (if it is what I think it is: adding views in github’s GUI?). I will see if I cannot use this one instead of Huboard, it seems better.

Taiga is very nice too, I havn’t checked if it is usable with github too.

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Ya I know Huboard I have tried it on my own server but it uses a lot of memory and I wanted something working with Gitlab but not found something interesting.

No it uses his own database and since it’s a FOSS software you can install it on your own server.

But I think you prefer to keep issues hosted on Github I guess.

Regarding Scrum are you familiar with it ?

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I don’t know Scrum very well, it is a bit nebulous to me. And I don’t know if it is really adapted to free software projects?

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Yes it is but the problem is not the kind of software you target is much more the team configuration, if the core team want to deliver in a regular basis releases, in scrum it’s usually every 2 weeks (called a sprint), which means every 2 weeks we deliver a matured release.

To make it short, Scrum vocabulary includes Backlog Refinement Meeting (BRM), Sprint Planning Meeting (SPM), Daily Scrum Meeting (DSM), Review and Retrospective Meeting, Sprint (2 weeks work) called also an iteration.

BRM: At the beginning we fullfill a Backlog with every user stories we have in mind.

An User Story (US) is basically a set of tasks that have to fit within a Sprint (2 weeks), and every US are usually prioritized (from top to bottom).

SPM: The next phase is the SPM, where we define among the US defined in the Backlog, which ones have to be setup into the next Sprint (2 weeks work). For each US, we specify the tasks needed to do, in order to accomplish the US. The idea, behind a Sprint, is to lock the core team work to the US selected during the SPM for the next 2 weeks and try to not go over.

DSM: Then every day we maintain a short DSM, which could be a topic opened in the forum to keep informed every member of the core team (and in a free software context, all the community). And each team member answered to 3 basic questions: what I made during the past day, what I am intended to do the next day, did I encounter any issue ?
This helps to see the progress of the work during the Sprint and review the objectives if anything are wrong or underestimated.

Review and Retrospective Meeting: At the end of the Sprint (2 weeks after), we plan a Review and Retrospective Meetings we enable each other to validate the US done and which ones that are not and need to be reported to the next Sprint. The Retrospective meeting helps each other to talk about changes they want to see in the management tool such as the 2 weeks Sprint.

And every two weeks we plan again a BRM and SPM to prepare an new idea.

Here are the basic idea of the Scrum that help me to boost my projects a lot.

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Are you applying this even when you are alone on projects? And I don’t know if I really want Scrum on uCoin in its current state!

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No it’s obviously useless on a project alone, but it could be useful if we incorporate a regular core team behind uCoin.