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The scrum tool I've been working on for a few months is seeing some real user growth.
One thing I find a little weird is jumping between the user communities
Earlier in my career, when I was doing c++ development, that was it. During my Java days, that's what I coded day in and day out. Flash/Flex, same thing. Sure, I've always dabbled in various technologies. Some scripting (perl, ruby), maybe play with the latest hotness (an iphone app). But I only ever felt like I was part of one developer community at a time.
But now, I find myself switching between the Flash/Flex world in my dayjob, and the Python communities in my extra-curricular. And they're vastly different. The flash world tends to be heavily design focused on one side and real enterprisey-development on the flex side with new frameworks, patterns, and methods of development popping up all the time. The python communities feel more pragmatic. Getting things done quickly and efficiently. Each new framework that comes out tries to be leaner and smaller, yet more expressive than the last.
So, I've been testing a web callback by using postbin - http://www.postbin.org/ - a pretty great service exactly for this sort of thing.
But I found that I'd really like to be able to replay those requests on a server running locally. A quick look behind the scenes at postbin, and it's open source on GitHub, and runs on google app engine.
So I forked a copy, made my changes, and uploaded a new version to my own google app engine account so I could use it right away.
I also sent a pull request to Jeff Lindsay, the developer on Postbin so he could incorporate the changes on the main site.
None of that is particularly amazing. But the fact that I did it in less than a half hour is!
Distributed VCS, running apps in the cloud, I hope this is the future of software development.
The other day over at ScrumDo we pushed a pretty major release that included a lot of new functionality and usability improvements. I'm especially proud of a the predictions tool and the excel import/export functionality. You can export an iteration, work on it in excel, and then import your changes back in.
But perhaps even more important, we are officially open source now. If you're a Django developer, and you use Scrum, consider pitching in some help. We've got a list of area's that we're specifically looking for help in and would be happy to have other things worked on as well.
Follow the project on twitter.
p.s. ScrumDo not ScrumDoo -- The doo wasn't working, t0o many people thought about poo.
I've been taking a shot at an agile story management website in my off-hours. It's not ready for prime time yet, but I think it's moving in the right direction.
I was able to get a talented developer, Ajay Reddy, to help me out in it's future development.
We plan on open sourcing it so anyone can run their own instance of the server. It's a DJango/Pinax/Mysql software stack.
My goal is to have a usable version up by December 6th. Any suggestions / comments are greatly appreciated.
Oh.. the name will be changing. Apparently both my wife and Ajay thinks it sounds too much like a form of excrement. Suggestions welcome there as well.
Eventually, I'll integrate the work I've done on Todo-Board into it.
We're moving to Agile/Scrum development.
Right now, we're using spreadsheets to track our backlog. It's working fine. But I've got a big project coming up, and the spreadsheets just aren't going to scale. I'm looking for something slightly more heavy weight than a spreadsheet, but still light, easy to use, doesn't get in the way.
It's got to be web-based since we have remote teams.
It has to support multiple teams on a single product with a single backlog.
It has to support a deep backlog with hundreds of items.
It must support the ?, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, Infinity point scale
I need a reasonable assurance it'll be around for 3+ years.
It should generate burn up charts for each team and for the project as a whole.
We already have a defect tracking system. I don't need that in the system, and would prefer it to be absent.
Pivotal Tracker is the closest thing I've found so far. But it fails the point-scale and the longevity requirements.
Rally and Version One are close seconds, but they're way too "Enterprisey". I want something quick and light.
I'm tempted to tack something onto Todo-Board, but it's more than I want to bite off right now.
What do you look for in backlog management software?
