Planning before coding
A goal without a plan is just a wish.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Hello learners, today I will be talking about Pivotal tracker, a tool I encountered during my preparation for Andela boot-camp. Unlike the many technologies ravaging the internet today, pivotal tracker stands out in a way that i feel is under appreciated. Its purpose covers a part of software development that is largely unfamiliar to the average indie developer. Project planning in software development is a subject so unrelated to programming syntax that it leaves even the most seasoned developers doubting its usefulness. I hope to demystify this misunderstood subject by sharing my experience with the Pivotal tracker tool.
What is Project planning
Why make a plan that you know you will eventually deviate from? How can you plan for a problem you are yet to fully comprehend? These are the questions that come to mind when confronted with the responsibility of Project planning. The trend among average developers is to discover the scope of a project while they code. Planning often seems like a waste of valuable time and effort.
Project planning in software development involves setting objectives, deciding on a development timeline and concentrating resources and efforts. A well thought out plan helps developers layout a framework that enables them to work toward achieving their development goals in the most effective and efficient manner.
Pivotal tracker
Pivotal tracker is a story based project planning tool that allows teams to collaborate and react to real-world changes instantly. Tracker maintains a prioritised backlog of project deliverables, broken down into small, estimated pieces, called stories.
We have all been there, when you have reached a particular stage of your programming process only to be confronted by the questions ‘what’s next’, ‘What depends on what’ and the most treacherous of them all…. ‘How long should it take? This is where Pivotal tracker comes in.
Pivotal tracker helps you scale out the many facets of you project in a non-threatening way. You start by brainstorming in the Icebox, which is a special group for unpublished stories. Then when you are ready to begin a story you categorise it either as a feature, chore or bug. Finally you give an adequate description to it and optionally create a GIT branch to commence the story’s execution.
Takeaway
The beauty of pivotal tracker in my opinion is that It follows the agile methodology of incremental tweaks and client feedback, with the idea of providing faster and more responsive software. In pivotal tracker you don’t need to lay out all the steps of your project. You instead have to write out just enough stories to bring about a significant update in the project and at the same time elicit feedback from the client.
I know I might not have dived entirely into the inner working of the pivotal tracker tool, but it was never my intention to. My goal with this post was to bring you into a knowledge of a better way of programming, to open you up to a style of planning before coding. And I hope I have accomplished this. Here is a link For more information on the pivotal tracker tool. Happy coding.
