Introduction: Tool selection and Usage Suggestions For small and medium-sized enterprises, they will not build their own servers and equipment rooms for deployment, but choose major cloud platforms. Choosing a SaaS project management tool can greatly reduce operation and maintenance costs.
Author introduction: Enoch line CTO Liu Ziqiang team used cloud effect for 3 years
Teamwork needs
Hangzhou Yinuohang Automotive Technology Co., LTD. (hereinafter referred to as “Yinuohang”) was founded in August 2016, located in The High-tech Highland Haichuang Technology Center, West Wenyi Road, Yuhang District, Hangzhou. Yinuohang is a high-tech enterprise integrating research and development, sales and service. Its main core business includes auto software, auto painting and auto parts. It is committed to creating a new pattern of auto maintenance platform with superb technology and advanced Internet thinking.
Enoch line currently has the following software products
- Auto repair management ERP based on SaaS, including inventory, maintenance process management, accounting, CRM and so on. Based on Web, Android, IOS, wechat H5, wechat small program and other operating terminals.
- Enoch line spraying whole process software, based on Web, Android, IOS and other operating terminals.
- Enoch line quotation software, based on the Web, wechat H5, wechat small program and other operating terminals.
- OA system, based on pin small program.
- And other products in the pipeline.
All software products are developed and maintained by Enoch software Department. The entire department is divided into product, design, development, testing and implementation positions, a total of about 30 people.
Due to the large number of software product lines, the personnel of each functional department could not assign special personnel to take charge of each product line, so the project system was not adopted. Instead, the project manager and product manager arranged development iterations according to the priority of demand and development resources. Therefore, when arranging manpower for each iteration, it is necessary to clearly understand the working status of each functional post. In the development process, it is also necessary to timely follow up the development progress and identify risks as soon as possible.
For the above reasons, we need to choose or build a project management and continuous integration system, and we need to consider the following factors.
- Basic project management features and configurable task workflow
- Clear and easy to use workbench and workflow notifications
- Resource storage and sharing
- Document management
- Managed code
- Continuous integration assembly line, and assembly line and Ali Cloud products docking friendly
- Use cost
Collaborative selection process
Initially, our team built an open source project management and continuous integration tool on our OWN ECS server and configured it to implement the basic requirements. But after using it for a while, I decided to choose an online SaaS project management tool for the following reasons
1. Low management efficiency
A. Many traditional project management tools do not have a very intuitive statistical view, so they need to export the task details to Excel for perspective or formula chart analysis, which is very inconvenient for daily management and submission of reports to the company.
B. Lack of intuitive daily statistics will also lead to insufficient data support when arranging the follow-up task schedule, so that the schedule is too tight or loose, resulting in the decline of output quality or waste of R&D resources due to rush work.
2. High operation and maintenance costs
A. It is difficult to upgrade an open-source product after it is deployed. If an open-source product is upgraded to a later version, compatibility problems may occur and configurations may need to be adjusted.
B. Resources are stored on ECS, consuming high storage resources. This problem can be alleviated by using NAS services.
C. If there are many screenshots and read/write operations on documents during daily use, the ECS occupies a large bandwidth. As a result, services deployed on the ECS compete for bandwidth resources, resulting in high bandwidth costs.
D. Back-end technology transformation. The back-end services are no longer deployed on ECS, but are deployed to Ali Cloud Serverless App Engine (SAE) products, and ECS is no longer required. For smes, it is a waste of resources to reserve an ECS for a project management tool.
We investigated the popular SaaS project management tools on the market. Some of the functions met our needs, but the following constraints were common.
- Ali Cloud products can not be directly connected. Our front-end deployment is OSS and back-end deployment is SAE. Although cloud products provide various apis for docking, they also provide plug-ins for common continuous integration platforms. However, docking is still complicated, and we even need to develop certain middleware for docking.
- Maintain an additional account system
- Charge is higher
During the investigation and trial of various project management tools, I happened to see the promotion of cloud effect products on the official website of Aliyun, and they are free for 30 people within a one-year period for small and micro enterprises. However, Cloud effect can be logged in based on ali Cloud RAM account, and provides seamless connection to Ali Cloud products, so I opened the trial.
Cloud Effects use effects
Since most of the r&d personnel need to view and manage various cloud products, they have opened their own RAM accounts. Therefore, using RAM account is not an extra burden for us. For enterprises that do not use RAM account, Cloud effect also supports using pin account for binding.
Set up ali Cloud RAM account for each employee, and configure departments and roles in cloud effect to start using.
The project management
The following workflow can be completed by properly configuring project management functions
- Project manager development iteration management
- Requirements lifecycle management for product managers
- Development task management for developers
- Test plan management for testers
- Defect life cycle management during testing
- Implement feedback management with customer department
The following features are involved:
Version management/iteration
Versioning and iteration capabilities provide a convenient way to manage various tasks, schedules, and resources. This allows managers to clearly view the progress of development iterations and identify schedule risks. The product department can also classify, review, and schedule tasks in advance.
demand
The requirements module provides basic requirements management functions and supports customization of various types of fields, states, and workflows.
Tasks can be associated with various file task resources and knowledge base entries as attachments to present the required content in a richer media way.
Requirements entered into development can create corresponding sub-tasks assigned to the developer, the developer can also quickly open the associated requirements to view the design details.
The test plan
Before or during development iterations, testers can use test plan modules to manage test cases, and they can also incorporate test plans with risks specifically declared by the developer. In this way, the test situation of each iteration can be effectively tracked to avoid omissions, and retrospective analysis can also be carried out in the replay.
task
In project management, various workflow-based tasks, such as development tasks, can be customized based on the status quo. The configured status and workflow helps functional personnel identify tasks that concern them and avoid missed delays.
defects
Defects are initiated by testers, repaired by r&d, and verified by testers to close. Use this closed loop to manage sudden defects in development or on line.
After testers create defects, they fill in the priority and remarks and assign them to the corresponding development, or they can be attached to the corresponding requirements.
In the dynamic bar, relevant personnel can carry out convenient communication. After the defect is repaired, it is marked as resolved and automatically assigned back to the tester for verification. After the verification and repair, it can be closed.
The knowledge base
A knowledge base is a document management center that can be project-specific or project-independent. Provides collaborative editing capability and fine – grained permission management.
Managed code
The Codeup code hosting service provides a complete git repository with basic functionality, including visual permission management, code merging, branch management, Webhook, etc.
In addition, it also provides code security detection functions, such as plaintext passwords in code, high-risk dependency packages, etc., such as log4j 2.14 high-risk vulnerability exposed these days.
The report function can also directly trace the code submission review behavior, which is very helpful for code quality management. It is worth mentioning that the WebIDE checkout code can be opened for development with one click in the code base. This is helpful when working remotely and dealing with urgent problems.
Files/shares/schedules etc
Project management also provides many other modules to facilitate sharing and collaboration among project personnel.
The workbench
You can easily trace your related work in the workbench. In daily work, each post only needs to focus on the tasks in the “I perform” TAB and ensure that they are completed on time.
Tasks will be grouped according to deadline and priority, which can effectively help individuals prioritize and screen out more important and urgent tasks.
The workbench also provides an easy way to create personal tasks that are project-independent and can largely replace a person’s daily TODO list.
The “I Perform “,” I participate” and “I create” tabs can basically cover most of the management scenarios for their own related tasks, avoiding frequent queries in the task view of a specific project.
Continuous delivery
The cloud pipelining feature provides the process configuration from code to deployment. Native support for docking with Codeup repository and easy configuration of various Webhook triggers.
The following is the architecture diagram of our software products:
For back-end applications, after Dockerfile is configured, the assembly line executes construction according to Dockerfile and upload the product to Ali Cloud container image service products. When deployment is required, the image is pushed to the corresponding SAE application for grayscale deployment. These are supported natively in the pipeline.
For front-end resources, webpack packaging scripts are called in the pipeline to generate artifacts, which can be pushed to the corresponding bucket of THE OSS service when deployment is required.
The following is a list page for the pipeline, where you can customize the header to show the fields that operations care about.
Pipeline configuration also has rich triggers that support manual/code base behavior/pipeline linkage triggering, etc.
statistical
Cloud effect provides rich statistical capabilities to aggregate data from various dimensions. Whether it is internal management or reporting to the company’s senior management, it is convenient to export the relevant statistics.
Up to now, we have more than ten application product lines managed by cloud efficiency, among which core applications have generated over 10,000 tasks, most of which can be completed on time.
Advice for small and medium enterprises
At present, for small and medium-sized enterprises, they will not build their own servers and computer rooms for deployment, but choose various cloud platforms, and choose a SaaS project management tool can greatly reduce operation and maintenance costs.
As for continuous integration, it is also very important to choose a platform that can facilitate docking with the cloud products you choose. Especially nowadays Serverless is becoming more and more widely used, and continuous integration platform is taking on more and more heavy tasks, so it needs to be carefully selected.
For enterprises whose core functions are hosted in Ali cloud products (such as ECS, OSS, NAS, SAE, ADAS, etc.), cloud effect pipeline can provide native docking support and adapt to the new features of each cloud product in the first time, enabling operation and maintenance personnel to focus on deployment process configuration.
In terms of project management, cloud effect provides easy-to-use project management, knowledge base, statistics and other functions, which can cover most project management scenarios.
Finally, in terms of price, the basic functions of cloud Effect are open for free and there is no limit on the number of users, which is very friendly to small and medium-sized enterprises to save costs.
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