Planning Release Cycles - Behind The Scenes of Gigantt's Development

We try to release a new major version of Gigantt every month. Sometimes it takes us longer, depending on how challenging the new feature is.

Our development effort normally runs parallel to our QA testing effort in a series of release cycles. Here is the actual snapshot of our next version's progress.

Gigantt v0.21 as of 2012-12-12

Green is what's already done. As you can see, we break down our work to a few chunks. First the big stuff - the major new features. When that's finished and tested by developers, the QA team can already have at it, to try and flush out the most outrageous bugs as early as possible (and also provide us with some feedback in general). While the major features are being tested, we start working on minor ones and on our bug backlog. Finally, we reach the stabilization phase in which we do nothing but fix bugs that QA has found.

And so it goes every month or so. Develop, stabilize and repeat. What you see above is a good way to organize any project that follows an iterative flow. Things are nice and parallel when they need to be. Also a great way to plan scrum sprints.

Soon we'll be releasing a much requested feature: team calendars (i.e. vacations, part-time workers). As you can see above, we just have to stabilize it a bit more before we unleash it on the world.

If you're managing a software project, try organizing it now in Gigantt. It takes just a few minutes to get started.