CHORDS Project Management will be guided by principles of low formal process and extensive communication among distributed team members. CHORDS will use the GitHub tools for Project Management and will implement a Kanban style workflow to track work. The NCAR CHORDS team will conduct weekly scrum meetings, typically on Monday mornings at 10AM. This will be an opportunity to discuss issues that have come up, help set priorities, and layout plans for the coming week. Bi-weekly telecons of the entire CHORDS team will also be held to coordinate the activities of the group.
As defined by GitHub, “issues” can be ideas, enhancements, tasks, or bugs. We will use all four types of issues when managing work for theCHORDS project. GitHub Project Boards will contain issues and will be used to categorize, track and document work. Frequent issue updates will be made and Project Boards will contain issues with markdown task lists as needed to track progress on individual items.
We will create a Kanban style Project Board (with columns for “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Completed”) for each CHORDS Minor Release. Similar to other Project Boards described below, issues in the Minor Release Project Board will start in the “To Do” column, be assigned to one or more individuals, and moved to the “In Progress” or “Completed” columns as their status changes. Pull requests will be made for each of these releases and merged when all tasks are completed. Milestones will also be used to track work on minor releases.
Project Board for these items will contain issues describing new feature requests or items that require further research. These issues may also have a set of task lists and/or milestone dates described in them. There will be Four columns on the Feature Requests and Research Topics Project Board: “To Do, “In Progress”, “Review” and “Completed”.
Project Board for portal maintenance and upgrade will contain issues that track needed upgrades or maintenance on portal software or explicit CHORDS instances. There will be three columns on the Portal Maintenance and Upgrade Project Board: “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Completed”.
Project Board for bugs will contain issues containing bugs reported by a user. Before worked on, the bug will enter triage to define the bug clearly and make recommendations for a fix. The bug will be assigned to one or more developers. There will be four columns on Bug Tracking Project Board: “Bug Reported”, “Triage”, “In Progress” and “Completed”.
Project Board for Project Management will contain issues that are related to CHORDS Project Management and Outreach, such as reports, presentations, posters, etc. There will be three columns on the Portal Management and Outreach Project Board: “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Completed”.
Separate Kanban style Project Boards will be created for intern or other tasks not associated with a release. These Project Boards will contain a mix of issues that range from tasks to ideas. There will be four columns on the Intern Project Board: “To Do”, “In Progress”, “Review” and “Completed”.
Labels for issues will include: “bug”, “feature”, “enhancement”, “research”, “high priority”, “rejected”, “short_term”, “icebox”, “backlog”, “project management”, “upgrades”, “sysadmin”, “refactor”, “documentation” and “intern”. In this way, issues may be quickly sorted as to their type. The purpose of each of these labels is described in GitHub.
Here is a graphic of how we plan to use GitHub pull requests and forks to manage development contributions, bug fixes and releases: