Task management
Bachelorizer follows kanban principles for task management,
using roadmap (described below) as a form of kanban board.
Kanban is a japanese management method
of visually placing signs (kam) on a board (ban),
intended to to aid in breaking down a project into smaller tasks
to support team-based self-organization
[@Anderson2016, pp. xi-1].
Two core principles of kanban
is to visually present an overview of tasks
as a way of identifying them,
and
associating tasks with a progress state
as a way of managing flow of progress.
Commonly a two-dimensional kanban board provides overview,
with individual tasks listed vertically
and divisions of task states horisontally
[@Anderson2016, p. 18].
One of the aims of these principles is
to establish a sense of sustainability
in the pace of working on the tasks involved in a project
[@Anderson2016, pp. 7-8].
With Bachelorizer,
the tool roadmap is used for visualizing the tasks.
Reason for this choice is an interest in creating an atmosphere
supportive of creative thinking and reflective learning
rather than efficiency,
for which the assembly line metaphor of conventional kanban boards
is considered counterproductive.
Roadmap is a command-line tool
to generate a somewhat organic looking graph-based tree of tasks
from a plaintext source task list.
Roadmap takes as argument a filename for a YAML-structured list of tasks,
validates that all tasks are related as a directed acyclic graph (DAG)
with only a single end node (a tree structure),
and renders to stdout an SVG format visual diagram of the tasks.
The diagram maps out the tasks and their relationships,
with prioritized actionable tasks as green circles,
other actionable tasks as white circles,
later tasks as red pentagons,
blocked tasks as orange rectangles
and finished tasks as grey hexagons.
Each task is defined with a keyword and a label in the YAML file,
optionally adding an explicit state
of either finished, ready, next (meaning prioritized) or blocked,
and listing directly dependending task.
Task state is resolved from dependencies if not stated explicitly;
only one task, the final goal, can and must have no dependencies.
After each YAML file edit the visual diagram can be (re)generated,
which also checks
that the edited YAML contents is structurally and semantically valid.
[@Wirzenius2025].
For comparison with conventional kanban boards,
roadmap visualizes not as a 2-dimensional matrix
with progress as rigid lines across the x-axis
and sustainability indicated by downwards depth,
but instead visualizes as a somewhat organic looking tree structure,
with progress as neat (non-warning-colored) branches
and sustainability indicated by color saturation.
The requirements for the first portfolio delivery for Bachelorizer
are summarized as the following tasks:
- Make a Kanban board for this assignment.
- Make a class diagram for the Bachelor programme and its components.
- Implement classes to represent the Bachelor programme and its components.
- Implement a method to check whether a programme is valid.
- Specify and run unit tests for the valid method.
These larger tasks have been expanded and reorganized
into more smaller and narrower focused ones,
visualized in the roadmap at @fig-kanban.
{#fig-kanban}
Diagram
TODO: Short introduction to the diagram.
Validity of bachelor programmes
The isValid() function in the Programme class
currently works by checking which type an activity has based on
the result of activity.toString().
It simply runs through every activity and adds 1 to a counter for each category.
It calculates ECTS based on getEcts() for each activity,
originally supplied by a long list of object declarations in the Main class.
This could very well be integrated with the database to get more and accurate
information about each activity,
but time pressure has prevented us from this implementation,
even though the project structure easily allows it.
The expected values for count and total ECTS for validation supplied
by the assignment description is then validated in a simple return statement.
The unit tests simply create example programmes similar to what is done in main
and then calls the isValid() function to compare to expected values.
Other unit tests could explore edge cases.
For example,
the current structure of the classes does not truly differentiate between
the subject modules that activities are part of,
so it has no way of enforcing that subject module activities
are part of exactly 2 subject modules.
Another implementation that could pass such a unit test would need
each activity to have an attribute describing which subject module it is part of.
