An Agile Circus of Project Management
20 Dec 2024
As someone who isn’t pursuing a career in web application development, I think there were a few things in my Software Engineering I course that I can see myself using outside of the course.
The two buddies managing a project
Two of the topics covered in class were agile project management and configuration management. Since configuration management is a supporting discipline that is most often integrated with any project management approach, it makes sense to talk about both of them together. This approach to managing projects breaks work down into smaller cycles, making everything easier to handle. In our case, we referred to these cycles as “milestones.”
Agile Project Management
In the course, we specifically practiced Issue Driven Project Management (IDPM), which is an agile project management process designed for teams of up to a dozen developers who need to build “web app” grade software. This was perfect for our course setup, as the largest project only had five members. For every milestone, we focused on a distinct segment of the project, then broke that work into subtasks called “issues.” We used GitHub’s issue tracker and project board automation features not just to break everything down, but also to track the status of each task. It was incredibly useful for staying organized, especially once the number of tasks started piling up and needed a more adaptive approach. By structuring our work around these issues, we were always able to deliver something tangible within the expected timeline.
Configuration Management
Meanwhile, configuration management served as the backbone that kept the entire process consistent and reliable. While we primarily used it for version control on GitHub—where we could see every commit and trace it back to the corresponding issue—it also helped us document changes to project files and other deliverables. Having this clarity ensured that if we ran into a problem or needed to revert to an earlier state, we could do so without any confusion. Essentially, configuration management worked seamlessly alongside IDPM to track everything we did, keeping our milestones organized and our work under control.
Overall…
Beyond this course, I can definitely imagine using these methods in projects that are not strictly about software engineering. Any project involving collaboration—like the vertically integrated projects at UH Manoa—could benefit from a centralized issue log in a platform like GitHub. Teams could outline the different tasks, assign them to the right people, and keep an eye on what needs to be prioritized and what can be pushed back for every deadline. This is especially useful in multidisciplinary settings where multiple types of work—coding, research, design—need to happen at the same time. By integrating configuration management to track and document all changes, teams remain organized and prepared to handle inevitable shifts in scope or deadlines. Overall, agile project management, IDPM, and configuration management blend together to keep collaboration smooth and flexible, which is something that’s crucial for engineers across every discipline.