We will now create a backlog of issues that you will use to keep track of your progress as you implement the design of your application. When creating issues, you should focus on delivering functional iterations that bring some value to the user. The technical hurdles you must clear to achieve those results are of no interest to your users or clients.
Here are the features we plan to be building in our first release:
- Display Current Location weather information for the current day
- Display forecast information for current location
- Add city search capability so that users can see weather information from other cities
- Add a preferences pane to store the default city for the user
- Improve the UX of the app with Angular Material
Go ahead with creating your issues on Waffle or on GitHub; whichever you prefer is fine. While creating the scope for Sprint 1, I had some other ideas for features, so I just added those issues, but I did not assign them to a person or a milestone. I also went ahead and added story points to the issues I intended to work on. The following is what the board looks like, as I'm to begin working on the first story:
Ultimately, Waffle provides an easy-to-use GUI so that non-technical people can easily interact with GitHub issues. By allowing non-technical people to participate in the development process on GitHub, you unlock the benefit of GitHub becoming the single source of information for your entire project. Questions, answers, and discussions around features and issues are all tracked as part of GitHub issues, instead of being lost in emails. You can also store wiki type documentation on GitHub, so by centralizing all project-related information, data, conversations, and artifacts on GitHub, you are greatly simplifying a potentially complicated interaction of multiple systems that require continued maintenance, at a high cost. For private repositories and on-premise Enterprise installations, GitHub has a very reasonable cost. If you're sticking with open source, as we are in this chapter, all these tools are free.
As a bonus, I created a rudimentary wiki page on my repository at
https://github.com/duluca/local-weather-app/wiki. Note that you can't upload images to
README.md or wiki pages. To get around this limitation, you can create a new issue, upload an image in a comment, and copy and paste the URL for it to embed images to
README.md or wiki pages. In the sample wiki, I followed this technique to embed the wireframe design into the page.
With a concrete road map in place, you're now ready to start implementing your application.
