OSDev.org

Would it be useful to have an article about project management? It might help beginners not to fail their OS projects because of poor code management. If anyone is interested, I can write it. Just wanted to check whether it would be useful

Project management is totally different from code management.

In a nut shell, project management involves a few stages:
1. preparations
2. main
3. post

For preparations, you would study the current market, identify the goals and feasibilities, research on competitors, estimate budget and schedule, list out milestones, develop business roadmap, and more.
For the main stage, you execute, review and refine the project plan and schedule, reflect to market changes (the need or trend), basically do everything to archive the goals.
When the project reached certain mile stones, the post stage, you do very serious QA and productization; prepare for updates/extensions, etc.

Marketing may also get started on about 2.5 stage.
For very big project, the situation may get exponentially complex, and may spin off a few smaller projects.

All these has nothing to do with code management, which is IMO a (yet important) technical skill (versioning, branch, experimental/tags, auto-builds/snapshots, etc)

The most important thing a project manager really does in the end is
1: Harass clients why they don't get stuff done
2: Harass developers why they don't get stuff done
3: Harass clients why they don't get stuff done
4: Harass developers... you get the idea.


And maybe a bit of this, if you got a freshman.

The real project manager is the guy who makes the stuff get done with as little friction and delays as possible.

Most project managers do not possess this skill.

Personally, I plan on soon adding the page Debugging Tutorial, and perhaps the prerequisite, "How to think"

Sorry, I meant Code Management. Anyways, real project management is irrelevant to hobby os developers, which are legion on this site. I thought this could help beginners not to fail because of a lack of organization.
PS: I like the picture

AbstractYouShudNow wrote:Anyways, real project management is irrelevant to hobby os developers

I can't agree with this, but this does not matter much as it might get off-topic to discuss management here.

So, I welcome you sharing your code management technique.

m12 wrote:"How to think"

It's interesting you say that...

Steve Jobs on code.org wrote: I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.

Bill Gates on code.org wrote: Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

Hi,

I think that an article on this would be pretty useful and perhaps will help some people avoid the cycle of continuous reimplementation because of the lack of initial management/design. Go for it!

Cheers,
Adam

Ok, I'm starting to work on this right now

After some trouble, the article is finally online! (it was ready well before but I never got the time to send it, sadly)
http://wiki.osdev.org/Code_Management
How about it ?

It needs a rewrite.

You probably want to refer to John Lakos book.

@Love4Boobies: Already? Care to elaborate?
@dozniak: Sorry, I didn't know of that book. Anyways, the wiki is open to contributions

BMW wrote:

Bill Gates on code.org wrote: Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

So true! That's why I don't think I've lost dedicating time to programing. No matter I never will eat from that. I won something.