Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

I recommend Pivotal Tracker or Trello for organizing tasks.

It's easier with N > 2 people involved but the rough workflow goes:

a) create a story in Pivotal that covers a new use case or a tweak to an existing one

b) start the story, work on the use case, add notes at the end of working on it so next time you work on it you can reference them

c) when you finish it, mark it 'finished', then deploy it and mark it 'delivered'

d) Then do acceptance testing: ideally automated, but manual is fine too for most cases. This is where it's nice to have a 2nd person check it for you. If it works, approve it, if not, reject it and go back to work.

Also, if you're not using unit tests, they're really helpful to keep you on track - never walk away with passing unit tests, and you always have something to start with next time you go to work.

Joined Pivotal Tracker and started dumping my project info on it until I found out that there is no story/task dependency!! That left out feature completely ruins the whole system. How can they not have it? Do you know any similar applications that you can build dependencies into?

i.e. for B to be in the "Current" queue, A must be complete

I appreciate you recommending these tools to me but they aren't going to benefit me if I only have a vague idea of what a "story", "use case", "acceptance test", "deliver", "deploy", or "unit test" mean. I only know how to write code. Is there a website or book you can recommend that teaches these things?

Honestly? Wikipedia has a decent overview.

The tl;dr versions:

Story: A story is literally a story about what you would like your project to do: "I want to be able to find and read news", for example on HN. That's what they call items entered into pivotal.

Use case: One way someone might use your project to accomplish a task. "I would like to reply to an email" for example.

Acceptance test: A test, manual or automated, that is the criteria for whether something is acceptable for a given use case

deliver: There's a button, it says deliver, you click it. Usually means making something available for testing

deploy: Put your project onto a server where other people can use it

unit test: An automated test that tests a very small amount of code, a 'unit', and is used for making sure that unit works correctly. C.f. acceptance tests above, which test a much larger amount than one 'unit'. An example would be a test that tests one function, one method, or one line of code.

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