Workflow Templates



  • I am looking for a project management tool that I can use as part of my courses, but for raisins outlined below I am drawing a bit of a blank.

    Basically, what I want is that a new student in a course can clone a pre-defined workflow consisting of a hierarchical organisation of tasks. The student should then be able to tick off the tasks as they are completed, and view progress as they go along. For some tasks, it is the teacher that can tick them off.

    I am thinking of tools such as Jira (or even the issue tracker in Github), but the problem is that these tools work under the assumption that once a task is done, it is done for everyone. Instead, I want a unique project clone with all the predefined tasks for each new student. The task structure I am envisioning is something like (nevermind the example, it's just to give it some flavour):

    [ ] Sprint: Don'ts and Don'ts in Hadoop (Progress: 7/10 tasks completed)
        |-> [X] Task: Read Introduction
        |-> [X] Task: Watch Screencast: Hadoop Rants
        |-> [ ] Task: Read Chapters 8 in Course Book
        |-> [-] Optional Task: Read Article "Hadoop Oops"
        |-> [X] Task: Install Hadoop
        |-> [X] Task: Run Example Problem
        |-> [X] Task: Write Experience Report
        |-> [X] Task: Submit Experience Report
        |-> [ ] Wait: Approved by Teacher
        |       \-> [ ] Extra Task: Complement Submission according to Feedback
        \-> [ ] Optional Task: Sprint Retrospective
    

    Add some nice visualisations to this so I can get an overview of the sprints (and I know I am perverting the scrum definition of a sprint here by having it already pre-planned for the students), see who else in the course is working on the same sprint, a burndownchart inside each sprint, etc. etc.

    To summarise, it seems like a fairly straightforward problem (it's basically just a big checklist), and it should be solved or solvable, but I can't really find anything that allows me to re-use a predefined checklist in this way...

    Suggestions, anyone?



  • @Mikael_Svahnberg Maybe Trello? It's commonly used as a sprint tracker anyway, and you can set up one board as a template and clone it for each student.



  • @clatter Huh. I had missed that Trello supports cloning.

    Trello is still a bit crude because there would need to be one "master board" for all the course sprints, and then one for each sprint. And I am not sure how easy it would be for me as a teacher to work with.


Log in to reply