GSOC Student Project Planning

Joel Sherrill joel.sherrill at OARcorp.com
Sun Apr 28 15:30:48 UTC 2013


Hi

I have been reviewing GSOC proposals and wanted to pass along
some advice. Most of the students I have reviewed, I have chatted
with so have a good idea of what they are proposing. But....

All of the proposals I have reviewed so far are missing a task list
or work break down at all.  I encourage all the students to make
a very detailed todo list.

For example, if your project involves working on a series of
target architectures, then the work on each architecture would
be at least one item in the work break down.  As another example,
maybe you are creating multiple new classes/handlers or
your project requires some work on a set of existing classes/handlers.
In this case, each class would be at least a work item. It may break
down if it is a development activity, since you would at least
need to address any design, coding, test, and documentation.

Documenting and testing would likely be repeated as sub-tasks of
different parts of the project.

Patch submission would show up if  the work can be incrementally
submitted. Which is most of the projects I have reviewed so far.

I would expect the dates in the GSOC calendar to show up as
deadlines.

Basically, you need to break things down to small incremental
steps. Put them in order. Plan deliverables, testing, etc.

http://www.projectlibre.org/ is a libre planning tool which is
similar to MS-Project. It can be used to create work break downs
and display them as Gannt charts, etc.

Your GSOC Project should be viewed from a planning perspective
as a fixed price contract with deliverables. Using project planning tools
is a part of live in the "real world". :)

-- 
Joel Sherrill, Ph.D.             Director of Research & Development
joel.sherrill at OARcorp.com        On-Line Applications Research
Ask me about RTEMS: a free RTOS  Huntsville AL 35805
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