On 2013-05-10 4:13 PM, "Amir E. Aharoni" <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>
wrote:
2013/5/10 Yury Katkov <katkov.juriy(a)gmail.com>om>:
> 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",
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
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One nice thing about wiki pages over google docs is that interested third
parties can see what is going on (which I would consider a good thing)
-bawolff