Experimenting with Software Development Management

Group projects sound pretty simple in it's own context.  Throw software engineering in and it becomes an entirely different animal.  Unlike regular group projects where everyone does their own thing, software engineering uses a management concept known as "issue-based project management."  This concept utilizes issues concerning the project which each member accepts to work on.  Each group member works on nothing else but the issues they've accepted.  The reasoning behind this is to reduce conflicts when integrating your work with another member's work effort.  This sounds efficient in concept, but is it effective in practice?

I spent a few weeks practicing this management concept and I have things say about it.  It seems cumbersome to work with considering that I have to created detailed issues to work on and then accept the same issues to work on..  Issues will definitely come up during testing which needs to be detailed and added to the list of issues needed to be looked at.  Considering that there were only three of us working on this project, I can imagine that it causes less anxiety because there might not be any issues to work on when the project isn't finished.  It would be less of an issue then.

By separating the work, I felt not so pressured when I could check up on what progress the others have made.  Despite the fact that we created these issues, we haven't exactly discussed a standard way of solving these issues.  It was fortunate that our project was designed to be modular, with only one point of entry for each module.  We used an interface to standardize this point of entry then went ahead and did our own thing.  Unfortunately, after the entry point, this non-standardized approach for our modules would make it harder for new developers if they were to look at our code since for each module, the modules we worked on were made with our own little quirks.  One of the other group members had a completely different way of parsing a date compared to mines.  When I created a date parser, it grew into a huge monstrosity that needed it's own class.  I can't say that it was the same for theirs since it was contained within a single class.

I find issue-based project management to not be an effective management style to use when there are only three members working on a project.  The amount of effort needed to find issues and consider whether or not it is worthy of it's own issue isn't worth it.  Not to mention that Google Project hosting doesn't exactly make updating issue statuses convenient.  Perhaps if we had someone who doesn't necessarily have to know how to program, but should at least know how to find issues for us to fix, this management style would have worked out better with less headaches.

Still, we were lucky enough to be not be grouped with any slackers and finished this project ahead of schedule, with the last few days spent just tweaking our modules and doing tests.  We didn't miss any of the planned features.  Our project is hosted here if you want to have a look.