Applying GTD to Software Engineering

Bryan Chen

Registered
Hi all,

Any other Software Engineers here who use the GTD methodology on native Apple products like Calendar, Reminders, Notes etc? Happy to sync offline and share some ideas and learn together.

I am fairly new to the concept and I find it the hardest to track progress and timeline on large projects (Scrum). It seems most task management apps lack this feature, that other collaboration apps like Smartsheet has.

Feel free to email me at bc2vf@virginia.edu if you want to chat!
 

Grant Grueninger

Registered
Hi Bryan,

Here's how I handled it at my last job:

For my personal and work GTD systems, I set up GTD systems based on areas of focus (I personally used OmniFocus (task lists), Calendar (calendar), and Dropbox (reference and project support) for personal, and whatever tools were handy (e.g. Outlook or Google Apps) for work).

For software development with my team, I use Jira and follow Scrum according to the Scrum Guide (https://www.scrum.org/resources/scrum-guide). It's important to note that Scrum != GTD: I use GTD for my personal project/task management (the things _I_ need to do) and Scrum for team software development.

These three systems are clearly separated by of "Areas of Focus":
- Personal: OmniFocus/Calendar/Dropbox folders
- Work, not-billed: Google Apps
- Work, billed: Jira

They're tied together by checklists and the weekly review, which are in my Personal system.

In Jira, I created "somedayMaybe" and "waitingFor" labels, with corresponding filters, so that I always have an actionable todo list that's transparent to the rest of the team. I check the somedayMaybe and waitingFor filters on Friday during my weekly review.

Grant
 
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