Uniting Trello, Toggl, Github, Gantt & Moodle into a single tool, with project leads/evaluators, members and real time management.
Context
During a 9 months project, I was in charge of leading, coaching and mentoring a 6 people team in the development of a platform for online learning in universities for Project Based Learning in a IT field.
The minimum viable product was finalished in time and publicly exposed successfully, graving a huge attemption from catedratics and mentors from the public and private institutions present.
The project allows the automanaged creation of teams by the students, with tools to help them find the best group to fit their profile, as well as a working environment to follow all the steps of development, while getting feedbad from teachers and real time mark progression.
As technical lead I was in charge of git management and merge review, code quality controller, visual standards reviewer, main frontend developer and general coordinator between all areas of developement, from business to backend, frontend and services.
The solution
Thanks to uniting Trello and Toggl we achieved a high control over the real project progress vs the initial estimation, as well as attaching tasks direclty to task delivery requested by teachers and version control on each delivered task.
It alswo gives statistics about each Iteration (thanks to including Agile workflows to the app) as well as statistics on whose member is working more on the different subjects.
Designing an interface and workfrlow for a huge application like this was not easy, but the result was satisfactory, mixing smoothly the usability with the visual attraction.
Simplifying workflows
UX was one of our main priorities, as subject evaluators (teachers inside the app) have to manage many groups of students, with many requests to send and evaluate and comment, but also course coordinators have even more than one subject to evaluate. For that porpourse, we designed a simple, yet powerfull main interface to manage all teams in the fastest possible way.
With this interface, teachers can view in a shot the overall progress of all groups (middle column), jump to any of their subjects (or colleges subjects to see how a the groups are doing in other subjects) and evaluate requirements for the different groups in just 2 mouse clicks.
There are 2 types of evaluable tasks, ones that require a submission and others that belong only evaluation objectives, without an associated archive to download (shown in the right column)
Uniting Trello, Toggl, Github & Gantt
Time management is a huge advantage to progress annalisys, making It easily accessible to users was algo a major goal. Acomplised by the menu shown below, users can quicly mark their tasks as work in progress.
Trello pannels, task based (mix between github projects and trello) also bring a fast paced development and status update
Gantt diagrams are a must in medium and long term projects, ours works automatically between the task timer, the trello like pannel and the tasks scheduled by teachers. Modifying any of the mentioned items will update It’s status on all other services provided by the app, and show updated info acordignly.
As shown above, all tasks are related to subjects, improving statistics on subject dedicated time, overall and by individual members.
Last but not less, users have a window for tracking the pending/submitted tasks for teachers, including the progress and marks obtained. Filters are powerfull all around TORO platform, allowing, as shown in the next picture, to show different subject tasks (or all of them) in just one click.
That being said, the overall experience was satisfactory and allowed all of us to grow in all ways, facing challenging objectives to surpass ourselves.
Source code and specifications
Source code, design and development documents can be found in the next sources:
– Source code GitHub repository (comingsoon)
About the team
- Nestor Sabater (me) Main technical director
- Amador Blasco: Business manager
- Angel Adrián : Frontend developer
- Cesar Picó : Main API development
- Martín Rufete : Frontend development
- Raúl Gonzalez : Digital business analyst
- Wanda Rodriguez : Main server engineer
