I use Youtrack for all of my project planning now. Currently I have 5 projects listed in Youtrack
- The Digital Sages: this is where I keep tasks that have to do with my company
- Edgemaul Rising: This is my unreal engine project
- Unreal Plugins: All things relating to any plugins I’m working on
- Housemates: My app that is coming out
- Blog: I create tasks for each blog posts that I want to draft up
Boards
Most people would use agile or kanban boards but atm I currently do not. I work alone so I did not find them useful to properly maintain
Knowledge Base
Great place to keep documentation for your projects. Each project I work on this is where I keep articles for how the project is laid up and also where I would share information to external users in the event that they need something while working with me
Issues
I do nothing fancy here, I just utilize a basic structure for all of my projects. For state, I use To Do, In Progress, In Review and Done. As for issue types, I use Task and Bug. Outside of this I have a field for a rough estimation of work that I use for the gantt chart. I also have a priority field that I use for organization when I do planning
Gantt
This is where the magic happens for me. I lay out the work that I plan on doing each month inside of a Gantt chart. Here is an example from April
Workflow
Throughout the month I am adding stories of ideas or items that I want to address. On the 1st of the month I do a planning session. Normally most people would do this every 2 weeks but since I’m a solo act I do it monthly since a lot doesn’t change on me in a month than compared to a team of 4 for example.
I do a search for all Unresolved issues in Youtrack and then decide what to work on. Anything with a high priority gets put on my list, then bugs and then new work. I’d go back and forth from assigning issues on my Gantt chart and estimates. I aim for roughly 20 work days each month or 5 work days for each week. Since this is a part time thing for me I consider a work day to be 4 hours of work, which you can set in Youtrack.
Once I have about 20 days of work, I then drag around the issues to have a priority from top to bottom for what order I want to do the work in. Once thats settled, I put them on the chart. I keep laying out the chart until 1 of 2 things happen, I either go over into the next month or I finish. If I go over, I prune an issue until I’m under.
I just keep repeating the process each month while making sure the 1st of the month is always opened for me to do planning