How should a programmer report to management?

Question

Task Management

After another conversation with the management, a question arose about reporting and work planning.
At the same time, the manager, of course, does not understand anything in programming, and I am too lazy to write daily / weekly status reports.
The company I work for has only two web developers and a fair number of projects that either need to be completely redone or maintained and a huge amount of bugs fixed (until it's time for a full update).
Due to the fact that we are young guys and have no experience in reporting and work planning, the question arose of how best to keep records for those people who do not understand anything in programming, but at the same time, have the opportunity, if necessary, to show their programmer friends and ask for advice "what do these guys do in my company?".
Actually, the question is: advise what tools / programs / solutions / notepads / somersaults / tricks to use so that it is easy and simple for us to live, and at the same time keep records daily or weekly?

Answer 1

There is such a magical thing - Trello. In fact, this is a task board with stickers only in electronic form. For small teams, that's it. Reports can be uploaded to json or excel, or simply give access to project boards to the authorities so that they can see the status of work in real time.
If Trello takes root, then you can switch to Jira or redmine.

Answer 2

Trello, Basecamp, Jira, Asana, etc.
All these services allow you to manage projects, indicate tasks, subtasks, what has been done, what has not been done, correspond with each task, comment, track time, show reports and graphs.

Answer 3

Ask your managers directly.
From myself I can tell you this.
How can the PM respond that before setting development goals, I make a list of features.
I break the project into modules or components and fill each module with features.
It looks something like this:
Users:
Creating a user
Deleting a user
Deactivating a user
And so on for each module. As a result, depending on the project, from 50 to 200 features are collected.
I collect my reports in this way, only the features are known to me. I collect mostly watches. Each feature is evaluated before development starts and I have a reference time. Adding to which the risks and correlation for experience, I can see the time required to develop a module or a single feature. Resp. I collect reporting on labor costs for a feature module.
Try to make a report in the form of which feature was reworked or made from scratch and how much time was spent on it.

Answer 4

Scrum suits you
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum

Answer 5

Try bitrix24.ru . We got it.

Answer 6

And how to explain the very essence of the problem? So I wrote part of the function in the class, corrected it several times, and so on. You won’t specify which variables you defined, how and in what quantity. It is clear that I can explain what it all does, but I will not be able to explain the complexity of the work. Classes are different

Answer 7

If it’s not important who worked how much, but what they did, then make more or less meaningful commits and descriptions for them, who needs to open the code to see who doesn’t need to read about successes and fixes.

Answer 8

Decide who will be the lead. Install Bugzilla or Jira. The lead will partially manage tasks and bugs. Rallies about the state of affairs, 15 minutes a day is enough. Get a Wiki, general mail.