From Notion to Azure DevOps! (Backlogs & Sprints✨)

As SimulAIte began moving from a project I worked on locally to something deployable and developed as a team, my dad helped me set it up as a project in Azure DevOps. And I almost instantly fell in love with the Product Backlogs💗

Before this, I organised practically everything in Notion: schoolwork, extracurriculars, personal projects - and naturally, all the things I needed to build for SimulAite too. It worked perfectly well when I was simply keeping track of my own tasks.

But when multiple people need to work on the same software project, Azure DevOps made me realise how much more there was to actually managing that work.

Backlogs:

SimulAite is broken down into the following:

Epics - e.g. Customer Development, Product Development

Features - e.g. Student|Create Paper, Student| Manage Account

Tasks - e.g. Randomisation of Extract Generation

And for each task you can specify: Detailed description of the task, Its Priority, Who it's assigned to etc.

As tasks are taken on by a developer, their status is set to "completing", and then once its completed its set to "done". You don't delete tasks when they are completed meaning you have a thorough record of everything that has been done, who did them and when they did it (even the comments, and resolutions belonging to the tasks's pull request)

Sprints!

Another awesome feature is the creation of Sprints! Essentially you create a sprint for a certain block of time you have (e.g. in my case 1 week of half-term holidays) for focused development to achieve a certain goal/state in the project (e.g. Get the core-functionality Demo-able). Then you can simply drag and drop all tasks/features that need to be completed for this, into the sprint. Then you can start assigning the tasks to different developers and see their work capacities fill up real time (As you will have set an estimated time to complete for each task - always better to overestimate time than underestimate!). Then the team can work their way through the sprint, and you will be able to see Analytics on how the performance of the team is doing/the trend of work completion!

This has completely changed how I think about organising software development. I definitely still love Notion - but I can't imagine moving SimulAIte's development back into a normal task list now.