Project management

Plan for the now.

When it comes to building an application its never a good idea to just go and write something.  More often than not success is usually routed in forward planning.  After all, how are you going to know you are heading in the right direction if you've not laid out goals, or tackle problems if you have no means to record them when they crop up.  They will crop up.  You'll most likely need some way of documenting what you are doing, and communicating ideas with collaborators.  All these things may be summed up in Project Management.  People generally view this as scary.  Too professional for me, or just plain old fun sucking.  Wrong, wrong & wrong.  Project Management is easy, rewarding and adds an extra dimension to your coding.  Lets review some terms. When we talk about heading in the right direction we are thinking in terms of a roadmap, those objectives along the way are milestones, and those problems are issues.  Issues are resolved by setting and completing tasks.

We should never start out by thinking of the end program.  Instead we should consider the problem, and build the project around it.  The solution may manifest as a program, but that's a consequence of the problem solving exercise.  You've got good project management skills if you are able to solve  a problem by breaking it down in to self contained (testable) chunks, recognizing when each chunk is resolved, guesstimating the length of time required to full fill each task, consolidating the jobs, and reacting to unforeseen problems along the way.

Numerous frameworks embody the project management philosophy, and when it comes to software development most are built around version control systems.  The most popular at present is Github, go on sign up and have a poke around.  On the other-hand you may not be up for facing the public with your trials and tribulations, so why not install a system locally, just to try it out?  That's what we are going to do now, with Redmine.

Getting ready for Redmine

We may experience limited joy in this endeavour.  A fully functional Redmine requires several medium to heavy-weight services to be up and running, its probably unrealistic to assume that our Pi will cope.   With this in mind, I strongly advise that you install Redmine on a regular PC, if on the other hand you like a fools errand, then head over to my Pi page to investigate the installation.