Introduction
Road map was borne out of the need to quickly describe our team's road maps in a visual and easy to understand fashion. Previously, we had used a combination of PowerPoint, Visio, LucidCharts and GraphViz to present this information - with each person doing their own thing. That doesn't scale particularly well and it makes for a lot of work.
Being SREs, we don't like doing lots of work that doesn't scale - so we built Road map to solve the problem once and for all. Road map is by no means as powerful as any of the tools we used prior to it, but it doesn't have to be - it is simple to use and describes the information we care about with minimal fan-fare.
Enough talking, let's show you what we're talking about.
Example
Here is an example road map and some examples of the visualizations which can be generated based on it.
Road Map
title: Example Road Map
description: |
This is an example of what a road map might look like. It can include **Markdown** if you
wish.
authors:
- name: Benjamin Pannell
contact: contact@sierrasoftworks.com
timeline:
- date: 2021-04-21
title: Project Start
description: This is when we will start working on the project, get the team ready!
objectives:
- title: Market Dominance
description: |
Provide actionable analytics drawn from big data to improve our brand identity in
the advertainment sector, maximizing clickbait and establishing ourselves as a disruptor
in this industry.
milestones:
- title: Build the Team
description: We don't yet have anyone, that's not gonna work...
deliverables:
- title: Team Lead
state: DONE
requirement: MUST
description: This person needs to know enough about this domain to be able to run with the project.
- title: Senior Engineer No.1
state: DOING
requirement: SHOULD
- title: Junior Engineer No.1
state: TODO
requirement: SHOULD
- title: Barista
state: SKIP
requirement: MAY
- title: Finish the Project
description: We don't need other milestones, do we?
deliverables:
- title: MVP
description: Who needs a polished product? Let's just ship the MVP and call it done.
- title: Marketing
- title: VC Funding
- title: Yacht
reference: https://lmgtfy.app/?q=yacht&t=i
Outputs
Markdown
A great way to visualize your road map once you have it prepared is by generating a markdown file to represent it. This can be done using our Markdown tool, which converts your roadmap.yml
file into a gorgeously laid out Markdown file for human consumption.
go install github.com/SierraSoftworks/roadmap/tools/roadmap@latest
roadmap render markdown --in my-roadmap.yml
This chart was generated using our GraphViz tool, which converts your roadmap.yml
into a diagram in DOT format. You can then render this diagram with GraphViz, or view it in an online tool like GraphViz Online.
GraphViz Chart
This chart was generated using our GraphViz tool, which converts your roadmap.yml
into a diagram in DOT format. You can then render this diagram with GraphViz, or view it in an online tool like GraphViz Online.