Make Progress Visible

From Programmer 97-things

How are we doing? Are we nearly there yet?

Well, good question, but how do we answer? Having a numbered list of contributions, with the latest contributions appended to the tail, gives a rough and ready sense of progress. But how many of those contributions can actually be considered complete? You can scan the list to see which titles have a corresponding page, but for items with a page, is the page just a sentence or of notes or is it 400 words of article?

At first sight you thought you had 40 items, but a quick scan reveals that 15 are just titles without pages. A deeper scan reveals that another 15 are under the minimum word limit for an article. That leaves 10 that can be considered ready or near ready. That's a lot less than 40.

An alternative approach is to adopt a less ambiguous visualisation approach from agile project management techniques, establishing a clear definition of done. The 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know project has used this approach, classifying contributions as Completed, In Progress, or Not Started:

• Completed
  Contributions in this section are effectively complete from the author's point of view. Items placed in this section must meet the word-count requirements (at least 300 words and not wildly over 500 words) and the associated author bio must also be complete. Authors may continue to edit their own items in this section, and items will also be copy-edited, but the idea of completeness is that the items are potentially releasable.

• In Progress
  Contributions in this section are partially complete. They do not yet meet the word count requirement, or the author bios are incomplete, or the authors do not currently consider their items complete and potentially releasable.

• Not Started
  Contributions in this section only have a couple of sentences of suggestion or are just titles.

In addition to providing a concrete definition of done, this approach allows items to be dropped without introducing a hole in the listing, makes completion order rather than submission order the dominant ordering, and, of course, makes progress visible.