Introduction
The software market is growing fast, with computer systems everywhere and prices dropping as more and more projects are off-shored to low-cost development centers. As a result, software engineers need to deliver more high quality products in less time.
Products can no longer be developed without prior planning, task management and quality assurance.
The market cannot afford a failed project rate of 90%.
Team leaders require that their developers perform all kinds of tasks. Some of them small, some large, some sent by mail and some simply come up in a casual hallway chat. Not all tasks involve programming. There are times when you are asked to make a functional specification, high/low level design, different kinds of presentations, mock-ups, technical reviews - you name it. The developer needs to know what to begin first, what the priority is for each task, what the deadlines are, send the task to QA and respond when it is returned. Bottom line: project managment is far from being simple. You can, of course, try to arrange everything in your head but experience shows that this is rarely an optimal solution, or one which even works it never works. Everything that is clear today, is forgotten the tomorrow, especially if you receive new "urgent" tasks frequently. What's worse is that more often than not, the need arises to discuss a past task or review some documents related to it. Relying on your own memory is simply not enough.
The team leader point of viewIf it's hard for the developer to coordinate their work, it is much harder for the team leader. Team leaders commonly receive more than 100 e-mails and participate in three meetings daily. That does not leave much time to think about what needs to be done, take it apart into small tasks, dispatch these tasks to the developers, set priorities and inform the necessary persons when they have been completed.
The QA engineer point of viewEach and every module should be tested. The role of the QA engineer is to approve a specific feature or make sure that a whole module is working correctly. When a developer finishes their task they perform a unit test to confirm that it works correctly and then send it to undergo quality checking. The QA receives the task, checks it and informs the developer of the results. Only after QA is satisfied with the results, the task can be closed. Needless to say that a QA person is working with more than one project, gets a lot of tasks to check and need to defend his decisions regarding the quality of a certain feature
The project manager point of viewFrom a higher-level perspective, the project manager needs to track the progress of each of the modules, worker capacity, and measure the risks of not delivering the product on time. This can potentially become quite chaotic: the work needs to be divided into projects, then into modules and finally into atomic tasks. Tasks must be assigned to developers, which in turn need to deliver them well and on time. The quality needs to be checked by Qa personnel, who must agree with the developers about the final status of the task. In advance we need to share our work with other people inorder to review and measure.
InTask to the rescue!InTask was designed to help team leaders, developers and QA personnel to share their efforts and deliver products on time. If you are a team leader, you can arrange all what is needed to be done in a hierarchical manner, then prioritize and dispatch it to the developers. At any time, you can monitor progression and if needed you can re-balance the tasks. As a developer, you will automatically receive all task which are relevant to you, including deadlines. You will be able to send these tasks to QA and receive feedback. When you have finally agreed with QA regarding quality, you can close the task and remove it from your
"To-do" list. As a QA person you will automatically receive all tasks that need to be verified and once you are done you will be able to set your status and remarks about the quality, before sending it back to the developers. A task is never completed unless both QA and development set its status to 'Complete'.
What's more? You will be able to see tasks history (ping-pong from development to QA and vice versa), attach relevant pictures and documents, send inner mail about it and even attach relevant code blocks. At any time a variety of reports can be reviewed and print to share with other people.
InTask has been designed to work exceptionally fast with no extra overhead. If you currently use Excel or Notepad to manage your workload, InTask is certainly for you.
Whether you are a single developer or part of a large team, you simply cannot meet the challenges of today's software development market without using a fast and reliable task management system.
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