Introduction to Trello

Problem Statement

Trello helps teams work more collaboratively and get more done

As CS students, many classes prioritize team projects to simulate the software engineering world. We see this in classes such as:

• CS 3110: Data Structures and Functional Programming

• CS 3152: Introduction to Computer Game Development

These classes are all wonderful in simulating the amount of coding teamwork that goes into the software engineering world at many of the forefront companies like Facebook and Google. But these classes fail to teach good practices in keeping up productivity within your team and making sure the tasks are done quickly and are split up evenly by the whole team. These are skills that are essential for software engineering jobs, and we hope to fill that gap.

Background: Project Management With Kanban

Constraints

Trello has multiple pricing tiers including a well rounded free option

Tier 1: Free Option

Using this option you can make as many teams as you would like, and within each team you can make up to 10 kanban boards. Within a kanban board, the user should be able to make an unlimited amount of cards and list, meaning the possibilities will be endless with the work you can achieve with one board. The one main caveat is there is a limit of 10 megabytes per file attachment to a card. This means you can't really upload your code to each card, but if you couple Trello with our Code management recommendation, Github, this shouldn't be an issue.

With the free option the user also gets access to 1 power-up per board. Power-ups are how you use third party applications such as Google Calendar and Slack in association with your board. Power ups aren't needed for how we recommend a student to use Trello, but if you want to become a more advanced Trello user, power ups are a great avenue.

This also rings true with the automation that Trello possesses, for most cases a user can advance the progress of a board and you don't need to setup automation to achieve that. If you would like to become a more advanced Trello user the free option allows for:

• 50 command runs each month

• Commands can only be limited to simple automation tasks

Overall, Trello's free option has everything you would need to ensure good project management practices for a CS student, but also has the power ups and automation for a user to grow into a more advanced Trello Board Maker. The other options are nice, but are mainly for businesses.

Other Tiers

Scope

The Trello section won't however go over power-ups and automation on Trello as we don't believe these tools are essential to the amazing collaborative project management Trello achieves. Once you are done with this section and become a beginner Trello user, feel free to be more advanced and use automation and power-ups to your advantage.