The Chandler Project Blog

One common question about Chandler is: Are Chandler Items (Notes, Events, Messages, All of the Above) supposed to represent individual task items or projects? If they are individual tasks? How do you make a project? If they are projects, how do you split off individual tasks?

The real answer is: Neither…and Both. Chandler items are by design, ambiguous about whether they represent tasks or projects, because tasks and projects are in reality, ambiguous. Oftentimes what starts out as a neat line-item task can quickly spiral into a half-dozen issues to resolve, questions to answer, not to mention to-dos to do. Sometimes, Chandler notes are most useful simply as a way of keeping track of lists of individual tasks.

Jos Yule recently wrote into the Chandler-Users list describing how he uses Chandler items to keep track of lists: Bugs, Current Work and a Log.

I’ve been using Chandler successfully now since the 7.x release, and
have been quite happy.

I’m using it for both personal and business “stuff”, and i’m trying to
get a feel for how other might be using for Software Development.

Redmine is a web-based software development
tool, with issue tracking, milestones, message boards, wiki’s and
integrated version control tools. It really quite rocks. However, a lot
of the time i feel like it is over-kill for most of my projects. I like
the flexibility that Chandler gives me.

On one of my projects, I’m using the Hub to give access to some of the
projects notes to other stakeholders, coders, artist, audio guys, etc.
… What i’m doing is, in Chandler, i’ve got a collection, Project X,
which is where i keep all my notes related to that project. I then have
a “Project X Public” collection which is published to the Hub, where I
have dragged notes which are to be shared with other team members from
the private “Project X” collection. I’ve got a BUGS note, and a CURRENT
WORK note. This seems to be working so far, but i’m wondering what other
software devs do (if anything)? I haven’t had to get too granular so
far, ie. just a general BUGS note, but I figure that if I need to I can
create a new note for each important bug, and have that in the public
collection too… I’ve also got a LOG note where I record what I’ve been
working on…

Anyway, that’s what i’m doing… How about you?

Note The screenshots below do not include real data.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 12:57 pm and is filed under How I Use Chandler. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.