AgilePlanner at Jotspot.com

I recently became involved in an open source project called AgilePlanner through Bob McWhirter of Codehaus and OpenXource. "Not another agile planner?" I hear you say. Yup! But this one is wiki-based. The wiki itself comes out of Jotspot and is nice and easy to use. Bob introduced me to Scott McMullan of Jotspot who is actively involved in the project and Bob has also organised the participation of a Google Summer of Code student.

I'm interested in this project for two reasons. First, it's open source and there's plenty of room for some competition and improvement in online planning and tracking tools for the poor man. Second, the use of a wiki is worth exploring as the medium for such a tool, especially in the evolution of user stories as part of adaptive planning.

A user story represents a conversation that has occurred between the customer and the developers. It has 3 parts:

1. Card: A written description of the functionality used for planning incremental development
2. Conversation: Discussions facilitating a drill-down into the details of the functionality required
3. Confirmation: Acceptance tests capturing the details and used to determine when a user story is complete

Given the successful use of wikis as a collaboration tool in team environments, capturing and organising emerging information, they seem well suited to the Conversation aspect of user stories, i.e. deriving the details through discussion. The developers should discuss the details of a user story with the customer at the point when the details become important, adding notes to the user story as appropriate. You can imagine a user story being a wiki page where these emerging details are recorded.

Closer integration of tracking with FITNesse acceptance tests

Agreements about the functional details of a user story between the customer and developers are documented as acceptance tests.

A number of online planning tools record acceptance tests as note-like elements, perhaps with a checkbox to say 'accepted'. I am sometimes tempted to think about a closer integration between the planning and tracking tool and the build/continuous integration system. My temptation is to provide the customer with a single dashboard, in a single tool, that monitors progress throughout the iteration and assesses the iteration's end result in terms of passing/failing FITNesse acceptance tests. AgilePlanner is a wiki that can embed wiki applications ....

Having said all that, i have not actively pursued this idea because it's not 'the simplest thing that will work'. No doubt my recurring temptation will continue to visit me.

posted by Simon Baker @ permalink
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