Project management tools for research

[anelda]

[This email was first sent to the discuss mailing list but there's been some interesting comments hence the issue. ] [snip] I am struggling to advise our researchers about which tools to use to manage their research projects, data, communication, documents, calender, etc with. Some suggestions has been Asana, Trello, Slack, amongst others. I understand that individual researchers/research groups may choose to use any tool they prefer and that they probably came to using the tool because they saw it in their community or heard about it from a friend. My question is, at a university level, what is a good default workflow to recommend to researchers if they're completely new at using software to manage/share? So the audience is not computer programmers (github won't work). The great thing is that so many tools integrate with each other these days - Take e.g. Trello's integration with Github, Drive, etc. If you have any ideas or suggestions of something that works or is recommended by your university, please let me know. I would really appreciate your ideas and inputs. [snip]

Please post your comments, suggestions, ideas here.

[anelda]

@gvwilson pointed me to this repo - a lesson specifically for management of software projects.

[anelda]

@dpshelio posted the following:

I'm organising a conference pretty much to discuss that exact point!! You are not going to be in London the 2nd and 3rd of March for any chance, are you?? - Rest of Software Carpentry, you are also invited if you want to join (registration will be opening soon).

http://sciencetogether.online/

In the tools section, I have a bunch of them that I know can improve research collaboration. As an ultimate workflow... I don't know, maybe we can get something out about that... Sometimes the university has already put some tools in place (either homebrewed or contracted like microsoft/google/...) and not using these to share some information (student's marks for example) may be breaking some laws. Where I work we are using slack, connected with github/travis/jenkins/etc... together with waffles (Trello like for GitHub) and that pretty much does the job. Most of the tools nowadays have some type of integration built-it to use others and if they are not available probably there tools like cloudpipes or others that can connect these:

http://alternativeto.net/software/cloudpipes/

One important point to have in mind is how these research groups want to interact with external collaborators. How much they can force the machinery to ask other people to create yet another account in X service. For example, slack works as one account per team, so I have lost account of how many accounts I've needed to create. Other services like IRC (yes, that's still used in the open source community) it's accountless, you just choose a nickname when using it and that's it. The same applies to document sharing - nowadays in most of them offers you a link so people can access without an account (like our beloved etherpads) but then you may have lost the information of who has edited what - Anonymous1 vs Anonymous2...

I will keep you all informed of the output of the conference :)

[anelda]

@npch posted:

A few years back, I tried to map the different types of software project management infrastructure, based on when they're needed at different stages of maturity for a project (see attached). This drew upon sources like Fogel's Producing OSS, with tweaks specifically for working in a research environment. Would be interested in getting comments on whether I've missed anything.

What I never did was map the current tools to these types - e.g. we've gone from using IRC to Skype to Slack for Real Time Chat, and Trac to GitHub Issues and Trello for Issue Tracking / Project Collaboration (which is something I've missed from the diagram).

[anelda]

Hollydawn Meunier posted: You may find this handy: http://innoscholcomm.silk.co/ It's a searchable database of tools used in scholarly comms, and also has some workflow examples. I particularly like the ability to filter by research phase.

[rgaiacs]

Adding @npch diagram.

infrastructure.pdf