Welcome to Agile Planner

News

You can check out a sample project of the latest code snapshot at: http://agileplannerplan.jot.com/WikiHome/AgilePlanner/Projects/chore.

I've just added a growing list of agile resources:

Agile Resources

• Agile Manifesto
• Agile In Action
• Agile Estimating & Planning
• Martin Fowler's Bliki
• Paul's Agile Blog

They are also in the left-hand tool bar.

Involvement

We need help! If you'd like to help develop AgilePlanner, drop some email to bob at openxource.com or scott at jot.com.

Goals

The goal of Agile Planner is to create a useful XP/SCRUM project-management application on top of the Jot platform. We're drawing on experience with XPlanner, Rally and VersionOne to create a tool that helps realize agile development methodologies. A lot of software development is geographically distributed these days through the use of contractors, remote employees and out-sourced development labor. Agile Planner aims to support these models of development within the scope of agile methods.

Requirements

Through the use of story cards, non-technical stakeholders can describe how they see the system working from the view of various users. Personas help to envision the users of a system to avoid creating functionality that is not truly needed by anyone.

Planning

User story cards are broken into concrete tasks to be performed by the developers. The customer arranges these tasks in their own priority list in order ensure the right parts of the system get the most attention. The tasks are worked on in iterations or sprints.

Execution

Part of executing on an agile method involves daily stand-up meetings. By standing, instead of comfortably lounging, meetings are encouraged to be shorter. These meetings are purely for status updates, and are not a placee to solve problems, fix bugs, etc. The typical format involves each developer reporting:

• What they did yesterday
• What got in their way
• What they are going to do today

In a distributed environment, having stand-up meetings is more difficult. By using a system like a structured blog, each developer can create a daily entry with the three bits noted above. The blog then acts as both an agenda for the meeting as it occurs online (through IM or IRC) and also as a permanent record.

Tracking

Tracking involves not only following the progress of an iteration, but also measuring the accuracy of estimates. Estimation is one of the more difficult parts of planning and by providing metrics, developers and managers can improve their estimation skills. To truly track the progress, no only should time spent be measured for each task, but a honest assestment of time remaining.

Problems occur when, for example, as task is estimated to take 2 days, and after two days work, the project management system asserts that it should be complete. The developer, on the other hand, may feel another 2 days of work is required to truly completely it. For this reason, the 3 types of time to be tracked are:

• Estimated
• Actual
• Remaining

Reporting

By comparing the estimated to actual, estimation skills can be improved during the next round of planning. By tracking the remaining time, regardless of original estimates, the project manager can maintain a clear view of effort that is required to reach the goals.

Getting Started

Notes

During out analysis, we've put together some notes on the "competition".

• XPlannerNotes?
• RallyNotes?
• VersionOneNotes?

Additionally, we've examined how each does iteration/spring planning

• IterationPlanningNotes?

Online Sample

Since Jot development occurs online, the development version of the application is available.

• AgilePlanner

Screenshot

Here's a screenshot of the dashboard for a project called "chore"