Nonlinear Workflow for Planning Software Projects
Good software development achieves complexity by describing the interactions between simpler components. Although we tend to think of software processes as step-by-step “wizards”, design and decoupling of components often means that the interactions are non-linear. So why should our software project planning be defined in a linear progression of steps with time estimates? Can we plan projects using a non-linear workflow that mirrors how we think about component design? The figure above is an experiment in task planning that I recently used to try to describe the complex dependencies between different tasks in a project....