Reporting where the project is and what you've been doing is a common feature within a development project. Reporting is however not something that's liked since it takes up too much time (among other reasons).
Personally I track what I do in a TiddlyWiki. More than that seems to be redundant. The basic features of a Wiki make it a great tool for tracking what you do on a project. As a notebook it is superb and then adding the cross references (links) and index (tags) it surpasses any solution I have tried in the past.
However good this as a personal solution, it doesn't cover the needs of management. The often rigidly formatted documentation can be a real pain to work through as format constraints often exceed usability.
In consideration of this, as well as finding myself in a position with a sudden need for a status report from others, some reasonable solution had to be found. Among the things I'm experimenting with is a near-agile test automation development process. Of the things within the agile development world I've pulled in are the cycle and the need to plan what to do in a cycle.
My original idea was to use a two week cycle. This did not tie in with the classic development processes adopted outside of our group. As such I've switched to a 1 week cycle which is way too short, but it does mean that there is a synergy between us and the rest of production.
With each cycle is the associated planning for the cycle. The planning is a simple top-down approach - task with sub-tasks. The tasks and sub-tasks are prioritized (high, medium, low) and scoped (short, medium, long). This information forms the basis of the ultimate report.
For now, I've put the planning in an MS Excel file and supported the basic actions with macros. The macros pull the data from the planning cycles into a formatted template. The priority and scoping data is being used to generate an approximation of the actual effort - total and remaining.
This seems to be an effective solution. Planning is a good thing which is being positively reinforced by the least-effort status report. I just need to put some more thought into the effort estimates as well as into some additional efficiency options.
Personally I track what I do in a TiddlyWiki. More than that seems to be redundant. The basic features of a Wiki make it a great tool for tracking what you do on a project. As a notebook it is superb and then adding the cross references (links) and index (tags) it surpasses any solution I have tried in the past.
However good this as a personal solution, it doesn't cover the needs of management. The often rigidly formatted documentation can be a real pain to work through as format constraints often exceed usability.
In consideration of this, as well as finding myself in a position with a sudden need for a status report from others, some reasonable solution had to be found. Among the things I'm experimenting with is a near-agile test automation development process. Of the things within the agile development world I've pulled in are the cycle and the need to plan what to do in a cycle.
My original idea was to use a two week cycle. This did not tie in with the classic development processes adopted outside of our group. As such I've switched to a 1 week cycle which is way too short, but it does mean that there is a synergy between us and the rest of production.
With each cycle is the associated planning for the cycle. The planning is a simple top-down approach - task with sub-tasks. The tasks and sub-tasks are prioritized (high, medium, low) and scoped (short, medium, long). This information forms the basis of the ultimate report.
For now, I've put the planning in an MS Excel file and supported the basic actions with macros. The macros pull the data from the planning cycles into a formatted template. The priority and scoping data is being used to generate an approximation of the actual effort - total and remaining.
This seems to be an effective solution. Planning is a good thing which is being positively reinforced by the least-effort status report. I just need to put some more thought into the effort estimates as well as into some additional efficiency options.
