Generally what we do in Pivotal Tracker is add high-level stories to the icebox and break them down into smaller (2 points or less) stories once they go into the workflow. If necessary (to avoid confusion), we tag the stories to group them.
I definitely like Scrumy's simplicity as well. It seems that Scrumy and Tracker cater to two slightly different needs: Scrumy seems to follow the letter and spirit of Scrum (which is not a bad thing), and leaves it up to the developers to make fair estimates of time. Tracker's main strength (at least for me) is the ability to set fixed milestones and then play "what if" dragging stories around ahead of and behind those milestones until the velocity-based prediction says the milestones will be met on time. It is also helpful when milestones are approaching and you need to start pushing stories back to the next milestone, as it shows your burndown rate and updates your velocity every iteration (showing you how far off your predictions were). It seems like Scrumy would be best for more free-form and independent teams where you can release on your own schedule and Tracker would be best for situations where you either have strict short-term deadlines (due to marketing commitments, etc.) or you have one or more "X- factors" (such as fresh junior developers or a CEO who likes to change project requirements from week to week). Jarin On Feb 3, 12:17 am, Rob Kaufman <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Jarin, > No worries about the double post, it happens from time to time (especially > if its you're first post here). > > When ever I look at Pivotal Tracker I'm struck by how you can only plan > the stories in it. I know there are a baggilian different methodologies > that get lumped in to Agile, but I'm partial to XP as described by Kent Beck > himself here:http://rubyurl.com/SO2f[amazon] and more recently I've really > liked the conciseness and clarity of this little > titlehttp://rubyurl.com/xySq[oreilly]. In both of those works the planning > game > [1] has two parts. > > The customer (or voice of the user) works with the developers to determine > story cards go into the pile for a release. Then the selected stories are > divided up by the developers into task cards (which say different things > than story cards) and done in iterations (of which there may be many of in a > release). I find good users stories to be too big to just handle and I have > to break them up into little chunks of tasks to make head way. Am I right > that you can't really handle that in Pivotal? I feel like I have to be > missing something here. How do you break down your stories? Or do you have > smaller stories? I've very curios as to you're work flow. > > One tool I've been keeping a close watch on is scrumy.com as they seem to > have the simplecity thing melded with both stories and task planning... now > if only they could toss together an API (I won't put stuff in where I can't > get it out) I could get seriously behind it. > > Lastly on this topic I have been thinking about it a lot over on my > bloghttp://notch8.com. I'm looking lately at the various methodologies and > how > XP and GTD are secretly two side of the same coin. > > Best, > Rob > > [1] They stopped calling it a game in the second book. Too many people with > sticks in uncomfertable places that got upset about having something as > serious (ly boring) as planning meeting and Gannt charts reduced to a 'game' > > On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 12:26, Jarin Udom <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Oops sorry for the double post folks, for some reason my first post > > didn't show up for a while. > > > On Jan 31, 4:09 pm, Jarin Udom <[email protected]> wrote: > > > After trying Basecamp, Lighthouse, Mingle, etc., I've become a huge > > > fan of Pivotal Tracker: > > > >http://www.pivotaltracker.com/ > > > > It's quick, simple, and easy to use, and fits scrum/agile like a > > > glove. > > > > Jarin > > > > On Jan 30, 9:06 pm, GarethLAtWork <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > Hi folks, > > > > > I'm researching agile project management applications such as > > > > ScrumWorks, Rally, VersionOne for use at work. > > > > > 1) > > > > Does anyone in this group have a favorite application for managing > > > > projects? > > > > > 2) > > > > How much would it cost to get a custom open source application > > > > created, using RoR or something like it ? > > > > > Thanks, > > > > Gareth. > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
