Project Management Tutorial Part 1, Planning and Design

Luckily/Sadly, there is no pressure for me to complete this on any timeframe, and it’s secondary to the rest of my work, which is far more important. However, a nice diversion is always in order, and helps get my mojo back into my regular programming work. Read on for the rest of this…

Planning
Here’s our tools, as my hard drive is fudged up to no end I’m reinstalling everything.

The specific versions should not be important, as I would like this tutorial series to survive past these versions, although there will always be changes. Even though ruby 1.8.4 is recommended by the rails team I am going to try 1.8.5 as that is what is available on my server.

Here are the feature requirements:
Tasks

  • Add/Edit/Delete(a/e/d)
  • Assign Tasks
  • Categorize Task
  • Assign to Project or Sub-Category of Project
  • Divide into Sub Tasks
  • Quick-Create Tasks(client feature)
  • Update status of task
  • E-Mail on status change of task
  • visible/invisible task based on user role
  • Change Priority of Task
  • Send notification out of task priority change
  • Add task via IM, via email, via web, via XUL

Users

  • Users System, a/e/d, login, change password, request password change
  • User Roles, such as developer, manager, client manager, client
  • User Permissions: create task, update task, change status of task

Billing

  • Record hours for each task
  • Billing preferences
  • PDF Export

There’s a lot more that can be/should be added to make a complete, fully featured application. But that all should do well for the run of the tutorial, and then some. Of course, for a first iteration, it’s ridiculous and should not be considered at all.

Let’s make some stuff for the first iteration. Personally, I like to get the XUL Interface up and going as well as the ruby interface, so that’s what we’ll do first.

Let’s limit this a lot.

  • Task Database Object
  • Add Task via Xul Client

What a small iteration! But that’s ok, there’s a lot of additional work that goes into it to get it to lay out properly.

Posted: October 30th, 2006 under Firefox, Ruby on Rails, Tutorial Series, Tutorials, XUL, XulRunner.
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