XP Release Tools

Bookmark Blog Post

	del.icio.us
	Digg
	DZone
	Furl
	Reddit

Quinton Wall's Blog | April 6, 2006   6:45 AM | Comments (1)

Its been a while since I was involved on a full lifecycle implementation project. These days my role is more architectual and business development focused but right now I am in the fortunate position to be working with a large organization on a critical WebLogic Portal project here in the NorthEast. One of the enjoyable aspects right now is that as the project lead I need to focus some of my time on the release planning and project iterations. I am a big fan of Extreme Programming in keeping project overhead light but meaningful so my first set of tasks is to work with the customer and put together a set of user stories that we all agree upon is the right set of functionality for the initial phase of the project.

As I mentioned above it has been a while since I was on a full implementation project so I was interested to see if the XP world had moved on in how iterations were planned. My first instinct was to go to the local convenience store and buy up all the CRC cards I could find to start scribbling tasks and stories on but then I did a bit of searching on the web and came across 2 great tools:

• ProjectCards

  is a client/server app where I can enter my user stories and tasks. Developers can then install the client on their machines either as a standalone client or as an eclipse plugin. I am a big fan of what I call organizational computing or convergent engineering where the focus of development should be centralized. In this instance within the Eclipse IDE. As a developer I want to go to one tool so I can write code, deploy my app, model and design my components, check the db, check bugs and now even look at my user stories. (I am working on some papers that describe my view of Organizational Computing at the moment which will hopefully give you a bit more insight into my perspective (excuse the Eclipse pun!) of modern software engineering.) So with that said, Project Cards looks great with a few issues I have come across. Firstly it seems that I can only assign time estimates to a user story and not individual tasks. In the past I have found it sometimes necessary to estimate individual tasks. Yes I understand the concept of the user story being able to be small enough to fit into an iteration etc etc...but often I need a better understanding of whether story is 50%,60% whatever complete. The best way I have found to do this is to look at how many tasks are completed verses those that have not been started.

  My second complaint, and IMHO a BIG complaint is that I had a problem on initial set up that the default admin credentials were not working. I searched the online forums, posted to it and even emailed support directly but not a single response back! Luckily I found the problem seemed to be related to using the default web server port that the ProjectCards uses (although it was already some obscure port) and I was able to continue. Hopefully I have demonstrated through my involvement in dev2dev that I am a strong supporter of software communities to ensure a technology/project/solutions success. Hopefully my experience so far with the ProjectCards community isnt reflective of the norm.

• Extreme Planner

  ExtremePlanner is a web based tool that seems to have a all the same functionality of ProjectCards plus the ability to add estimates on a task level verses just the story level which is nice. The interface is maybe not as slick because its web based but hey there is some flexibility gained by being browser based (eg: what happens if someone involved in the project just wants to see some status reports online? with xPlanner they dont need to install anything). I am still investigating this tool some more but it looks pretty nice too.

So what does any of this have to do with BEA? Yes in the end we are a software company but without successful implementations (read projects) there is no point having the software in the first place! With BEA's blended strategy and recognition of the importance of productivity tools such as Eclipse I can see my ideas of Organizational Computing and Convergent engineering becoming more and more achievable. Its still some hard work but lets take advantage of the tools out there to make those aspects we can more simple and efficient.

Comments

• I am happy to note that the folks from ProjectCards responded to support request. The tool is definately worth a look (primarily due to its integration with eclipse) but I think I am leaning towards Extreme Planner at the moment primarily because I need to be able to estimate and track task durations. (It should be noted that this feature is listed in the feature enhancement section of their docs)

  Posted by: quinton_wall on April 6, 2006 at 10:12 AM