2013-12-16

My Personal Project Workflow/Toolset

I do a lot of side projects, and my personal workflow and tooling is something that's constantly evolving. Right now, it looks something like this:

  • Prognosticator for tracking features/improvements, measuring the iceberg, and tracking progress
  • WorkFlowy for tracking non-development tasks (the most recent addition to the toolset)
  • Trac for project documentation, and theoretically for defect tracking, though I've not been good about entering defects in Trac recently; it doesn't seem worth the effort on a one-person project, though with multiple people I think it would be a must
  • Trello for cross-cutting all the above and indicating what's next/in progress/recently completed, and for quickly jotting down ideas/defects. Most of the defect tracking actually goes in here on one-man projects right now. This is a lot of duplication and the main source of waste in my current process.
  • Bitbucket for source control (I also use Atlassian's excellent SourceTree as a Git/Hg client.)

It's been working well for me, the only issue I have is duplication between the tools, and failing to consistently use Trac for defect tracking. What keeps me in Trello is how quick and easy it is to add items to it, and the fact that I'm using it as a catch-all - I can put a defect or an idea or a task into it in a couple of seconds; I just have to replicate it to the appropriate place later, which is the problem.

I think the issue boils down to being torn between having a centralized repository for "stuff to be done" (Trello) and having dedicated repositories catered to each type of thing to be done (Prognosticator, Trac, and WorkFlowy); and convenience. Trello is excellent for jotting something down quickly, but lacks the additional specific utility of the other tools for specific purposes.

I think what I'll end up doing is creating a "whiteboard" list in WorkFlowy, and using that instead of Trello to jot down quick notes when I don't have the time to use the individual tools; then I can copy from there to the other tools when I need to. That will allow me to cut Trello down to basically being a Kanban board.

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