Listaflow: Empowering Remote Teams

The Client

The Open edX® community is an Open Source community with people contributing from places all over the world. The Core Contributors are a set of team members trusted by the community to provide critical functions such as maintaining repositories, setting standards, creating features and reviewing changes. This team is distributed world-wide and does not meet in person for planning.

Project Objective

Remote teams enjoy many advantages, such as the flexibility to work from anywhere at any time. However, coordinating work within distributed teams can present significant challenges. This issue is further complicated in flat organizations, like open-source communities, which lack traditional management layers. Without managers to assign tasks or check in with team members, conventional planning methods, where managers distribute work, are not feasible. If meetings are held to coordinate, they often require team members to join calls at hours that negatively impact their health.

The Open edX® community was using a platform for biweekly planning, but it was being phased out. Monday.com was considered but wasn't optimized for recurring checklists. Spreadsheets were also an option, but they were cumbersome and inefficient. While Process Street offered most of the needed features, it lacked support for third-party extensions essential for automation. Ultimately, none of these tools provided the required functionality or were open-source, preventing the community from making improvements. Enter OpenCraft!

Project Solution

We designed and built a new application, Listaflow, to coordinate planning across teams for each sprint. Initially developed as a prototype to address our own needs, we recognized a shared challenge within the community and refined it into a full product. The application automatically generates checklists from a template for each team member, ensuring that no one forgets key tasks during the sprint planning process.

Building this solution required the skills we had long demonstrated, including product design, extensive development expertise, and close cooperation with the teams using the application to continuously improve the result.

Product Approach

Starting with interviews, we identified the needs and concerns of individual team members and their expectations for the solution. Our product team pinpointed the critical features that would benefit the team and developed a design that was both creative and highly functional. We began with wireframes and completed the process with fully implemented designs.

Design Approach

We began by creating the logo and brand elements for the project. These visual assets set the foundation and were seamlessly integrated into the web application design, ensuring a cohesive and appealing user experience. Our UX and UI team played a crucial role in actively testing and refining the developers' work to ensure the application's look-and-feel matched the original design vision. Where user feedback highlighted opportunities, we adapted and enhanced the design to optimize usability.

Technical Approach

We developed Listaflow using Python and the Django REST Framework, which allowed us to build the project’s core functionality quickly and maintainably. For the frontend, we chose React and TypeScript to deliver a dynamic, type-safe user experience. Recognizing the significant state management needs, we created a custom library called Providence, with Redux as the backend, to simplify and accelerate the process. Once development was in full swing, we deployed Listaflow via Kubernetes to our internal staging and production clusters and made it accessible to the Open edX® Core Contributors.

Results

The project has been a success for both our team and the Open edX® community. It's allowed us to plan sprints independently, monitor team morale, and verify task completion through checklists. Our reporting features help uncover critical issues early, such as recurring problems affecting multiple team members that might otherwise go unnoticed. We compile feedback from team sprints into comprehensive reports, providing a clear and accurate overview of team dynamics.

Despite a last-minute development push prompted by the urgent need for a replacement tool, we delivered Listaflow ahead of schedule, ensuring that the Core Contributors could coordinate their sprints without interruption. The continued global rise of remote work has further driven demand for tools like Listaflow that streamline team coordination and keep everyone aligned. We continue to actively maintain and improve Listaflow as an open-source project.

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