A three-week project fails quietly in week one, when everybody is “working on it” and nobody can say what is finished. A board fixes that, and it can be a sheet of paper.
Three columns and a rule
TO DO DOING DONE
───── ───── ────
Read the file Ask for the year Menu prints
Average per month (Priya, Wed) Sample data made
Handle a bad year
Write the usage note
The rule: one card per person in DOING. Anything else is not a plan, it is a wish list. A card moves left to right and never backwards; if it has to come back, it was two cards.
Writing a card that works
A good card is a thing that can be finished, phrased so that two people agree when it is:
- “Handle a year with no readings” — finishable, checkable.
- “Work on input” — neither.
Put a name and a date on every card in DOING. Not to police anybody: so that on Thursday, the question is “how is the bad-year card going?” rather than “how is it going?”, which is a question nobody can answer usefully.
Milestones
Mark the two or three moments the project must pass through, and put them on the board where everyone sees them:
| Milestone | What has to be true |
|---|---|
| Spec agreed | The client has said yes to what we described |
| Walking skeleton | It runs end to end, badly, with fake data |
| Feature complete | Every promised feature exists |
| Tested and documented | Test plan filled in, usage note written |
The walking-skeleton milestone is the one that saves projects. A program that runs end to end on Day 3 — reading nothing, printing placeholders — turns every later card into an improvement instead of a gamble.
The status update
Once a week, three lines, in writing:
- What moved to DONE.
- What is in DOING, and who has it.
- What is blocked, and what would unblock it.
Line 3 is the one that matters. A team that says “blocked on the sample data” on Tuesday loses an hour; a team that says it on Friday loses the week. The Community App asks for exactly these three lines, and your Code Journal is where the practice starts.
Curriculum connection
B4.3
use project management tools (e.g., Gantt chart, critical path diagram, PERT chart) to show tasks and milestones in a teacher-led project;
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B4.6
communicate information about the status of a project (e.g., milestones, work completed, work outstanding) effectively in writing throughout the project.
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B1.2
demonstrate the ability to solve problems independently and as part of a team;
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