Planning – Milestones

After detailed task lists are in place, it’s time to schedule them for the execution by assigning the real time lines and engineers. First step before scheduling is setting up the milestones. A milestone is grouping of set of meaningful functionalities. Milestones should be ordered based on the priorities of the functionality. Put the expected dates on the milestones.

Now tag each of the tasks with the corresponding milestones. Number of man days of tasks adding up in each milestone gives idea about the time it would require. If there is big difference between the duration available and number that’s showing up with the tasks list, consider options of adding more engineers if it’s possible or redefining the milestones.

One simple and obvious rule for task assignment to engineers is, group the related task and assign them to same engineer. It takes effort for engineers to build the context and they should allowed to make full use of it. Randomly spreading the tasks across engineers will cause unnecessary waste of the time invested in building context. Building newer contexts and dealing with switching contexts, increases the pressure on the engineers. It’s best avoided unless its must for meeting a critical deadlines. If these critical deadlines are coming very often consider it as bad planning.

The milestones planned can be tied to releases. A code release is a point where the qualified code in development branch of version control is branched off as separate release branch. There are no more developments done on the release branch. Release cycles are good way to label the code and also serves as a fallback option when something goes wrong with the development branch.