ServerZen.Net

Tasks

Starting with the more fine grained component, tasks are basically todo items. The important thing is that tasks are kept relatively small and well-defined. Individual tasks get assigned to persons for completion. And it is the responsibility of the person(s) assigned to the task to estimate how long the task will take (there is a field for this).

Stories

Stories are a way of grouping tasks in a logical fashion. Stories should always include overview text of the entire “feature” or piece that needs to be built and often times when a person is working on a task included in that story they will have to refer to the story text itself.

Iterations

Iterations are what would often be referred to as phases or milestones. The customer and project manager/team decide together what stories can be reasonably completed in a certain timeframe and those stories are assigned to the given iteration. Stories that have been decided upon but not yet assigned to any particular timeframe (for example, the client has to get further budget approval) can be left outside of any iteration to be organized later.

For those of you with project management requirements, the author highly recommends (based on active experience) taking a strong look at the eXtrememManagement tool. Even if eXtreme programming techniques are not desired, using xm as a general-purpose project management tool can make projects much more manageable.

Benefits

Of course further development, refactoring, and refining the base architecture generally provides a more robust solution to such an extent that businesses have to spend less time and effort managing and supporting deployed solutions. Having reusable components means less time spent developing new components and more time spent plugging in existing components which proves to take less time and thus less expense.

Risks

Migration of existing sites can get quite complicated. Also having to deal with switching frameworks such as making it difficult to maintain backwards compatibility with third-party products. Of course this gets easier as more and more third-party products adopt the same Zope 3 develop techniques which means education of this process moving forward is vitally important.