2013/5/10 Yury Katkov katkov.juriy@gmail.com:
Hi everyone!
What tools do you use for a small tasks in Google Summer of Code? I mean the tasks like "prepare the working environment", "learn gerrit", "write a blogpost", etc.? I thin that bugzilla is too heavy for this purpose.
Short answer: Google Docs, regular status meetings and a little bit of discipline should be enough.
Long answer:
I was a mentor in several projects. The most successful of them was in the last few months, and I mentored two students there. It's mostly done, and they are fixing the last bugs. They are actively studying, and together they had only about 10 hours a week.
How did it work? Very simply: We had weekly meetings. Each meeting began with the students doing a demo of what they achieved. Then we had a little discussion about where should the project go next and wrote a list of tasks for the next week in a shared Google doc. We were just adding more and more tasks to the end. We tried to stick to it and check that the tasks were completed in the beginning of the next meeting, and marking completed tasks as "done". And so on.
This way of management was inspired by the Agile management methodology, though it doesn't follow it precisely. The Agile principles that we tried to follow were: 1. As much as possible, letting the developers (the students) participate in the planning their own work and deciding what needs to be done. 2. Breaking the work into small and clearly defined tasks. This includes all work-related tasks: both actual coding, as well as stuff around it, such as "signing documents", "opening accounts", "learning Objective-C", "uploading to AppStore" etc. 3. Making a long-term plan, but being ready to change it along the way.
Trello was mentioned in one of the emails here. I didn't try it, but it may be good; It sounds like the kind of thing that was meant for this kind of task management. But honestly, if a Google doc works for you, don't work too hard to find something more complicated.
If the student you are mentoring has more than 5 hours a week, you'll probably want to do the meetings more frequently than once a week.
That's about it.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore