Ask HN: What was the best dev progress report you ever saw? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What was the best dev progress report you ever saw?

3 pointshasoleju5 comments

I have a problem. All my current ways to display the progress of our software dev project are not transparent and professionell enough to please our stakeholders. I already tried:

* Color coding the status of each feature in the roadmap using a ppt slide.

* Listing all major milestones with desired due date and current status

I'm hesitant to start time tracking of individual tickets and contributors because I think this is not the truely important kpi. But this is something that gets recommended often when I google "software development progress report".

Have you seen any great reports in the past?

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The best way to approach this is to find out what the questions are that the stakeholders have and then work out how to best answer them.

This is generally not a status report - that is largely useless and pretty boring.

What can be useful are things like project risks and mitigations.

What are the things that might derail projects and how are we managing the risks (if at all!).

Anything that the stakeholders can contribute or fix to e.g. we’ve got a bunch of open questions/blockers that need to be escalated.

The problem with most progress reports is they tend to always report things are on track until suddenly they aren’t. This is the most frustrating thing for stakeholders. Why didn’t we see this problem coming - how can it be that everything was fine and now it isn’t?

Good point. I will make the spent effort vs. estimated effort of a feature more transparent. This will show the risk of features getting delayed because no one is working on them. If it is transparent that no one is working on a topic, one can drill down to see what the reasons are. Stakeholders than can help to unblock that situation.

This: https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html

I loved the old ones even more: https://web.archive.org/web/20080401021836/http://www.bay12g...

The power goals especially, as they made it clear what all these little "features" set out to achieve. They were beautiful to read, and sometimes reading about the feature can be even more exciting than getting the feature itself.

But apparently these were hard to update so Tarn stopped. I think today, you could probably use something like Jira to add and label tickets and then pull it out with the API and export into HTML.

The power goals are really neat. They perfectly show what a user can expect from the sum of smaller technical updates. Kind of similar to user stories but not exactly the same since the power goals become possible after a lot of very different tasks are done.

See that roadmap you mentioned, use that. There will be a definite feature list with each version number if the stakeholders want to drill down into it, just give the next version number and the current date its expected on.

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