The Chronicles of Stuffed Guys

From an interview with Joel Spolsky:

JS: I would never have the chutzpa to say that I have the answer for all teams. However, in most cases, the key thing is to have a constantly-updated, real-time, highly detailed list of features and tasks, with priorities and estimates for each item. Then at any time everybody knows what they should be working on and in what order, and if you have good estimates, you should be able to say “if we do all priority 1 features, we’ll finish on date X, and if we also do priority 2 features, we’ll finish on date Y.” Now it’s a simple matter of setting a date that gets the optimal balance of features and shipping (shipping is a very valuable feature).

This highlights a problem I am currently thinking about in context of the project management system that we develop.

In a perfect world you can easily put a proper prioroty for any task in the project at the same moment when the task is being created. But isn’t a task priority — a relative thing? I mean, a task with the highest priority has this highest priority among all other tasks, no? If another task appears that has a higher priority then a task with the highest priority then what should you do? For some reason, I don’t like the idea of changing priorities of potentially tens if not hundres of tasks just to put a new task at the top.

Another problem with priorities is that you always end up with a lot of tasks having the same priority assigned. How can you decide what task to do or how can you tell a developer (if you are a manager) what task to do, if 20 of them are of the same high priority (or the same normal priority — doesn’t matter)?

So, my current thinking about this is that it is impossible to understand what task a developer has to do next just using the priorities concept. Priorities are good for some general understanding of how important is the task, but that seems to be all.

We have some interesting ideas regarding this issue that we are going to implement in Factory Nova. I don’t want to describe them now, just want to first make sure that they will work out as I expect. More about this later.