Tools Tools Tools

1
Tools Tools Tools

• XP Day 12 December 2008

2
Tools for what?

• Showing what tasks everyone is / should be
  working on
• Tasks on the backlog
• Estimates
• Effort recording
• Creating charts
• Tools are no use without the underlying set of
  disciplines, standards, processes

3
Modes of Use

• Whiteboard and post-its
• Problem of dropped tasks!
• Someone needs to manage the process
• Physical magnetic board use avatars to show who
  is working on which card
• JIRA as a tracking tool the business analyst
  captures content of board regularly
• TRAC maintained by developers themselves
  (capture tasks from the board)

4
Distributed working

• Stand-up meetings need to involve all sites
• Capture project board into a tool visible to all
• Use Skype
• Discipline dont talk to other members of the
  team on your own site on behalf of someone else,
  get them talking directly

5
Story granularity

• User stories must be unambiguous capture the
  value
• User stories must not be too fine-grained, else
• They can cause too much management overhead
• They can stifle the creativity of developers
• Bug fixes are user stories too
• Book Recommendations
• User Stories Applied For Agile S/W Development,
  Mike Cohn
• Agile Retrospectives, Derby Larsen
• Lean Software Development An Agile Toolkit,
  Poppendieck

6
Time Tracking

• Tracking time per task can be useful in
  retrospectives
• Visibility of individuals progress per task is
  sometimes counterproductive!
• When pair programming, you need to track the time
  for several individuals
• Diagnosing problems by tracking tasks that go
  back and forth between dev test

7
WIKI

• Very flexible works for some projects as a
  simulation of a project board
• Rather than answer the same question multiple
  times, capture the answer in tool

8
X-Planner

• Julien has used it for about 6 months, some time
  ago
• Time recording was difficult, easier to put on
  back of card needed to make one person
  responsible for time logging
• Still need the physical cards

9
TRAC

• Integrated with Subversion handles both bug
  tracking / fixing and task tracking
• Can capture much more detail than a card
• Can discourage users from keeping the physical
  cards up-to-date info already captured in the
  tool
• Continuous Integration Test is the way to
  capture whether bugs are fixed

10
Version One

• Has a good reputation as a payware tool
• Overkill for most purposes

11
Other useful tools

• Hudson Continuous Integration
• Better than Cruise Control?
• Bitten CI plug-in for TRAC (drives tests)
• PHP Under Control Project Dashboard,
  Documentation Generator etc.
• PHP Code Sniffer Check style conformance