Issue Driven Project Management

Following up on the user stories assignment, we were tasked with creating mock-ups using Balsamiq Mockups to wire frame our ideas.  After liberal criticism, we were then put into groups of three and instructed to come up with the best system possible.  The goal was to experience software development as a team, as well as to utilize Issue-Driven Project Management (IDPM).  To prevent clobbering updates, the class used Subversion along with Google Project Hosting to keep a working repository.  see http://code.google.com/p/solar-decathlon-teamhawaii-2/source/browse/

For the uninformed, IDPM is a style of Project Management where changes/updates are targeted towards fixing errors posted by users or other developers.  Basically, its a way for developers to track issues, and ensure constant feedback.  In the scope of our project, this meant using Google's built in issue-tracking system to issue "tickets" or assign jobs.  Then, whenever we uploaded something to the repository, comments in our commit summaries would point to the issues that the changes addressed.

Overall the experience of working with a team was quite positive.  Our group ended up divvying up most of the page content between two people, and giving most of the design elements to one team member who had a remarkably good interface.  Working with a team really pushed me to try and get things done early, as I knew there were other people counting on me.  I foud that one of the best things to do when faced with team situations is to work with close friends.  First off, you can avoid the initial akwardness of getting to know each other.  Second, by being close friends, everyone respects eachother's ideas, but at the same time, its fine to poke fun at someone's idea.  In my case, I felt like our group was better able to assign tasks as we knew eachother's strong points and interests.  Ultimantely, I feel like we took the best aspects of our separate projects and melded them together better than the other teams. 

As far as the IDPM, I can't say that it was of much use.  This project is probably too small to realize the potential (which I admit, does exist) of IDPM.  It felt like a chore to have to create an issue and close it in order to make changes to a page.  I can see how it might benefit larger organizations where different teams might be pointing out errors and asking another team to fix something, but as it stands, this project really didn't benefit from it.