Summary

Project management is a discipline that has been through many incarnations, spawning an entire industry of businesses and tools. The challenge is to build a platform that is sufficiently powerful and adaptable to fit the workflow of your teams, while remaining opinionated enough to be useful. It also helps to have an open and extensible platform that can be customized as needed. In this episode Pablo Ruiz Múzquiz explains the motivation for creating the open source tool Taiga, how it compares to the other options in the market, and how you can use it for your own projects. He also discusses the challenges inherent to project management tools, his philosophies on what makes a project successful, and how to manage your team workflows to be most effective. It was helpful learning from Pablo’s long experience in the software industry and managing teams of various sizes.

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• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Pablo Ruiz Múzquiz about Taiga, a project management platform for agile developers & designers and project managers who want a beautiful tool that makes work truly enjoyable

Interview

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• Can you start by explaining what Taiga is and the reason for building it?
  • Project management platforms have been available for a long time. Can you describe how Taiga fits into that market and what makes it stand out?
• Can you describe how you view project management and some of the unique challenges that it poses when building a tool for it?
  • How do the requirements differ between project management for software teams vs other disciplines?
• How is Taiga implemented and how has the system design evolved since it was first started?
• For someone who is using Taiga can you talk through the features of the platform and how it fits into a typical workflow?
• How do you maintain a balance between usability and structure in managing project workflows against flexibility and customization?
• Within an engineering team how do you view the responsibility for driving and maintaining the lifecycle of a project?
• What are the most common points of friction within a project management workflow and how are you working to address them in Taiga?
  • Onboarding and discovery for a new contributor in a given project is often painful. What are some steps that a project manager or product team can take to make that process more palatable?
• How has the landscape of project management practices and tools changed since you first began working on Taiga and how has that influenced your roadmap?
• What have been the most challenging or difficult aspects of building and growing the Taiga project and community?
  • What lessons have you learned in the process that have been particularly valuable or unexpected?
• What are some of the most interesting/unexpected/innovative ways that you have seen Taiga used?
• When is Taiga the wrong choice for a given project or team?
• What do you have planned for the future of Taiga?

Added by Pablo

1. Why did you choose AGPLv3 for a license?
2. How can Taiga integrate itself with other platforms that are typically used by teams?

Keep In Touch

• @diacritica on Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Website

Picks

• Tobias
  • Marchway Hydration Pack
• Pablo
  • Archery
  • 3D Archery

Links

• Taiga
• Madrid, Spain
• Traditional Archery
• Kaleidos
• Perl
• Monty Python
• Blender
• Agile
• Project Management
• Redmine
• Trac
• Agile Manifesto
• REST
• Django
• AngularJS
• Django REST Framework
• Scrum
• Kanban
• Taiga Mobile App
• Webhooks
• AGPLv3
• FOSDEM
• Iocaine
• The Princess Bride
• Taiga Tribe
• Fedora
• Atlassian
• Jira
• Trello

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA