At PalePurple we've always used trac and subversion to organise our projects, but found longer term planning difficult without additional systems. We wanted to be agile in our approach, but needed to have a firm grasp of our current status for our various customers. We work using a range of agile techniques that work for us, but do not follow any one of the agile development methodologies closely, finding that none suited our needs exactly
We tried project planning software, but there was just too much duplication of information we were already entering into trac. We also found that our developers disliked using two separate pieces of software for what essentially should have been the same job. We tried a paper based system of little note cards on a big cork board. These just showed the project, ticket number, title and estimated hours. This worked a little better as it was easy to see and plan out the work, and our developers had to do very little outside trac, but it required a lot of rather pointless writing on cards and regular adding up of numbers on cards to allocate new work.
We decided what we really needed was an automatic cork board, that would take the information from trac for us - so this is, essentially what we have. It has the same "tactile" qualities as the cork board, in that we can physically move our work around, but it instantly shows us any updates to the tickets themselves, and does all of those annoying planning calculations for us
Trac allows you to link everything to development (or related) activities, encouraging you to develop a process where management activities become part of your day-to-day development work. A typical project might progress like this:
- Set up developers, and available hours to set the total available hours for each week for your planning board
- Create a ticket for each task, including an estimate of the time it will take
- You then allocate your workload by adding tickets to the board through the simple drag-and-drop interface. The software then does all those annoying calculations for you, and tells you how much remaining developer time you have for each week
- As work commences on the project, developers log the hours they have spent on tickets. The hours spent are seen as progress on the ticket, so the total work remaining for the week will reduce. When developers complete the ticket, it is removed from the board)
- As the week progresses, the software also reduces the available developer hours, keeping you up to date with your time planning - and letting you know if you're ahead of, or behind your plans
- At the end of the week, any remaining tickets are moved into the "ongoing" section, allowing you to see what work has not been completed. This can then be reallocated as required
Please note that this product is not for sale - it is released under an open source license and you can download it here. We welcome feedback (patches, comments, success stories) and will offer paid-for support if required.
Also note that this has only been tested for the Firefox browser - the javascript is unlikely to work as intended with Microsoft Internet Explorer
