Yesterday I published a
Video blog about Gaia-Sprint which is an Open Source and free management tool for
Scrum the Agile Project Process. I had quite a few good reactions on it, in fact
LOADS of great reactions about it and I've now released a 0.6 version of Gaia-Sprint :)
The project is a Google Code project and can be found
here but for the lazy ones the source can be
directly downloaded here.
It works on Linux through Mono as you can see in the screenshot. And if you have a database called
sprint in
MySQL you basically don't have to do anything to install it except change the password in the web.config to access your database.
Features
There are several nice features in the system, first of all it has support for creating new users when you first come to it. A default user with the username of "admin" and password of "1234" will be created the first time you start the system.
Then you can create projects, as many as you wish. When you have created projects you can invite as many other users into your projects as you wish.
One project then again consists of several "Product Backlog" items where each Backlog item can be thought of as a User Story. There are
two metrics for Product Backlog items which are very important.
Estimate and
priority. This is the core of Scrum and to prioritize the backlog items is the job of the Customer. Though the customer might re-decide when the developer team tells him how much work (in complexity points) each Backlog item is. So the team decides the complexity points per item while the customer decides the priority of the items. This is highly Ajaxified in Gaia-Sprint through having Gaia Panels which are resizble (to set estimate) and movable (to set priority)
Then comes the sprint. A sprint is a 1-4 week long development periode where the developer team are being "left alone" by the customer. In the sprint planning meeting the Customer decides which items to start with through prioritizing the Product Backlog items. Then the team decides how many items they can fullfill during the sprint. It all starts by all team members giving a rough estimate of how many developer hours they have avbailable for the periode. Then they start picking Product Backlog Items into the sprint according to how many items they think they can complete. Then they divide each Product Backlog Item into tasks which are estimated in HOURS and delegated to members of the developer team. Then the sprint can start
During the sprint each team member in the Daily
Standup Meeting reports back to the
Scrum Master which then set the values for the "burndown" of the Sprint tasks on a daily basis. This will ideally create a graph starting at 100% in the beginning and ending at 0% at the end of the sprint.
There are also lots of other features in Gaia-Sprint, e.g. there is a "Dialog Backlog" which consists of all the communication done in a "chat-like" environment for the project throughout its history. You also have a "forum" for every Product Backlog Item where the specific Backlog Items can be discussed. In addition there are lots of other nice features. I've also taken the first steps in regards to "getting a design" on the system too. At least if a "logo-image" counts as a design...
What can I say, I am a developer and I am not supposed to have good taste in regards to design ;)
Scrum is a very popular Process for Software projects these days, especially consultancy companies are embracing it as if it was the "Grail" since they have very confined projects in time and space and often a very clear goal of where they should be in regards to features within a given time. I feel Gaia-Sprint all though currently very "BETA" is a great starting point for starting new projects in which you want to follow the Scrum Process. And since we have a commercial interest in having Gaia-Sprint installed (for FREE) at every system developer department in the world to show of our Ajax library. You can rest assure that it will be maintained. In fact we're starting our next cycle by using it ourselves :)
So to all the pigs and chickens (you really must read the pig and chicken story) out there, congratulations with a great new and FREE Software Management tool :)