Finding the right tools for the job.

So last week, was the first ‘official’ week of working on my Masters Project.

In my humble opinion I think It was a tepid start. Part of the problem is that I want to keep track of working on the project with scheduling and design like one would properly in the real world. However, when examining the software tools available to aid with planning and software design, are pretty diverse. Added, that is am really just a software development team of one, makes doing such documentation keeping somewhat odd.

First let’s talk about about software design tools. Sure there are quite a few UML design tools out there and some of them are open-source or free. The problem is tending to be ‘drawing’ software trying to make the act of diagraming easier they really do not do much else. There was really only application I found that allowed me to do a bit of everything. One that a person creates a brainstorm or mind-map, and take the elements on them to develop into deeper UML diagram and into planning that I found was Visual Paradigm. However, even its subscription model is sort of expensive. So I had to bite the bullet and get a short subscription.

Planning software was even more crazy. I prefer Kanban over Scrum, and I like Evidence Based Scheduling [EBS] for task time tracking. However, there is not a lot of software that supports both Kanban and EBS. So I settled on a little OS X Native application called InShort, which focuses on using PERT.

Neither are perfect, but they both do most of what I need and will work.