How to use Baseboard
As you might wonder how the baseboard is used, here's how our team typically works on its projects.
Basically, a feature is functionnality to develop. In basecamp environment, we express a feature as a todo list. Each todo item in this list will correspond to a single basic task.
Each todo item is quoted by the teammates, using the planning poker.
The team leader creates milestones in basecamp, containing generally one feature. He estimates the developing time, based on :
- what's been quoted by the teammates
- the number of people he wants to affect on this feature
- his own experience Then, he assigns the milestone a start and end date.
Each teammate assigns himself to a todo item and develops it.
When an item has been developped, the teammate marks it as done using the corresponding checkbox in basecamp.
In this example, we have 3 projects (Baseboard, RESTConnection, Foo). Each line inside a project is a basecamp milestone, with from left to right :
- Milestone name (+red outline if the milestone is outdated)
- Milestone quoted progress state X/Y where :
- X is the sum of finished quoted item in all todo lists associated with this milestone
- Y is the total of all quoted item in all todo lists associated with this milestone
- Milestone theorical progress state. It's the ratio between the quoted progress state and the real milestone duration (ie: the milestone might last longer than the sum of its quoted todolists items). Depending on what's been done and what's still to finish, the progress bar changes its color :
- blue: early
- orange: late
- green: done
- List of teammates working on this milestone
- Additionnaly, open items flagged as bugs (or open items in "bug" todolists) appear in the top right corner of the project.
Given the list a teammates in config file, a list of available people is displayed on the bottom. Finally, if you've defined a husdon server for at list one of your project and of of its test fails, the whole project will blink to alert your team.