Progress Update 1/3/2025
This is our first update. We’ve made some significant progress in starting, but don’t have a lot to show just yet. So far our focus has been on picking an initial tech stack, establishing a backlog with some initial goals, and then implementing the story database model and initial backlog UI. More details on each below:
Tech Stack
We chose to build using Go, Postgress, and React for now. We’ll likely refine the front end decision as we polish things, but for now, we’re just getting basic functionality in place.
Initial Backlog
We’re starting our initial backlog with a vertical slice through story creation and management. The end state here for our team is the ability to start using the product on our own to manage this project instead of using Pivotal Tracker. In the most simple form that means.
Story creation and editing with the following fields - Name, Description, State, Type.
State management to get the backlog sorting accurate to match Pivotal Tracker. There’s more nuance here than you might realize. Nothing complex to implement, but the details matter a lot so we’re ensuring that we get manual sorting right for anything that isn’t in progress (state = Started, Finished, Delivered, Rejected), then ensure that moving a story to one of the in progress states moves the story above all those not in progress but still allows manual sorting while in that state. And then finally ensuring done (accepted state) stories are sorted to the top by their acceptance date.
We’ll work on drag and drop here to ensure that is part of the initial foundation and working really well. There’s quite a bit of nuance here on the drag and drop functionality for Pivotal too. While Jira still struggles to consistently tag a story with the proper epic if dropped on that epic, Pivotal has done that well for over a decade while also allowing for complex movement within the various columns. We think this is an area we might actually expand functionality sooner than later once we’re past the core. You can stay updated on our full plan here. We think it was a missed opportunity for Pivotal to not have a Kanban board UI for state transitions.
Story Models
Not much to highlight here, but we can discuss some of the decisions we’re making early on. Feel free to comment if you have different thoughts. For now, we’re starting with a basic model that includes the project ID, type, name, description, state, and then dates for creation, deletion, updates, and acceptance. We’ve begun to design all of the other models that will be needed to support comments, and users, and labels, but haven’t implemented them yet. We’re only implementing what we need for each phase. While the goal is to build a replacement for Pivotal that is nearly a feature for feature match, we are only going to build what we believe is actually needed at any given point in time so that the project evolves efficiently and we leave the door open for improvements and optimizations on existing features.
Once we get this work done, we should be able to start using this on our own. We’ll have a single backlog column with basic story CRUD and enough state management and sorting for the things to not be chaotic.
