The Chronicles of Stuffed Guys

In our quest to create the best project management software (for online services-oriented company) we’ve recently stumbled upon a big problem.

You see, we have a schedule which generally outlines the whole roadmap for version 1.0 of Factory Nova. Some of the features on the schedule appeared to be taking much more time then we’ve originally anticipated. What was even worse — we’ve had to come back to previous tasks after they have already been marked as complete.

This mainly was happening because we’ve originally made a choice to inject as much flexibility in the Tasks module as possible (because we need flexibility in this functionality ourselves!) and so unsurprisingly we’ve ended up with tasks trees. In Factory Nova tasks can have children tasks, and those children tasks can have their own children, the level of nesting is not limited.

When you use trees to display data relationship you usually have a lot of additional difficulties: it’s hard to display complex trees effectively (ie. fast), it’s not clear how exactly to sort the branches, normal methods, like clicking on one of the table’s header cells do not work that well.

So after a lot of experimenting we’ve ended up with using Ajax and DOM a lot. We are now pretty good experts in this! We really love that we can apply modern techniques in our product and that these techniques help us to deliver a much better experience to the future users of our product.

But, these techniques also impose a lot of challenages that we have to handle and that, most importantly, take a lof of our time. Our time that we haven’t originally scheduled.

So, facing the problem of completely missing our original schedule, running out of money and starting coding for food, we’ve reconsidered our methods. Now we concentrate on the deliverables. We’ve split the whole schedule into 7 major parts, each part has its own deadline. If any part misses its deadline we abandon it and continue to the next part.

This way our perfectionists minds suffer, but we expect to get a complete product according to our current schedule. If we will have a complete product according to our schedule and it will miss some less important features (because we always do the most important first!) we can then make a decision based on the current situation if we can spend some more time adding that less improtant features or we better just release the product as it is because it is already “good enough”.

In any case, we expect to release a handful of upgrades after version 1.0. We have a lot of ideas that we would really like to have in a project management software that we use ourselves. Plus we are expecting to hear back from the future users of our product. What can be more valuable then ideas from people who will use Factory Nova to manage their own projects?

Currently, Factory Nova beta version is expected to be ready in June 2005.