Freelance Developer

At work I've been set at the task to evaluate and come up with a continous integration strategy. Right now we have a mish-mash of an development structure trying to utilize agile development, and using scrum to do our project management. However, test-driven development is not our native tongue, and the tools we are using aren't helping our productivity.

First of all we are looking for tools to keep our issues on track. The company I work for is a media company, delivering a range of newspapers, both digital and paper. And as a media company you have to roll with the waves, because changes come quickly in a ad-driven environment. There is a myriad of feature requests from other departments in our company. And we, as the development department have to sort out all of these and assign work effort to them. There are shared packages across domains, and there are of course domain centered ones. Things change all the time, and we need to get our QA up and running so we can handle this. So this article will in effect become a sort of lucid discussion over digital vs post-it planning boards.

After browsing the web for a while. Reading into other peoples agile development process gave me the impression that the finalized tool isn't set in stone. Generally speaking we have the post-it note camp and the issue tracker camp. The post-it notes guys speaking in joyous tones about the agility and flexibility of the post-it note. You can do whatever you want with a physical note on the wall. Organize it in whatever manner you want. Put little magnets on it to show progress even :)

And then you have the issue tracker crowd with their technological whizz-bang features. Mostly all trying to resemble the flexibility of the post-it note wall. And as of late, it seems they are more and more succeding. Tools like JIRA combined with GreenHopper seems to give you a certain planning board feel. But still the technology isn't quite there - we have no affordable huge touch screens several meters wide. Still just in the labs.

But what they do have is burn-down charts and the nice thing that you can integrate your issues with things like Mylyn in Eclipse, so you can have a better development experience. But is all this technology hassle really worth it? Will the return on investment be good enough to have to jump through these hoops that technology creates in your way?

Agile JIRA

It seems the favourites comes from Atlassian nowadays. So I went out and downloaded JIRA, and took it out for a spin. To see if I could customize it for an agile experience. I wanted to be able to insert simple user stories, and not having to relate to all the fields that you have to set when filing a bug. So I dutifully created my own issue types and screens. I created one "User Story" task, and a subtask which I called "User Story Task".

This wasn't that difficult to do, and I combined it with the GreenHopper plugin I mentioned previously to gain access to a planning board. I can now also hook up my JIRA instance in Eclipse, and have Mylyn take care of all my contexts. For those of you that haven't seen mylyn in action, you should really take a peek. The great thing is that it filters away from view all the files you are not working on right now. So if you switch tasks you get a different set of files open and in plain view. And this also aggregates down into for example the "Open Resources" dialog box.

But will JIRA give us any advantage over post-it notes? Well, you get automatic computation of burndown charts if you use the Greenhopper plugin. And of course that you can have all your issues together with your bug database. But my experience in using bug databases is that old bugs really do stay old. They aren't picked up and fixed. So maybe we should just put our bugs on the post-it note board as well?

And is manually producing burndown charts that much of a pain? We want to use charts to give us an indicator of how things are going, and charts buried down in a webpage will probably stay there - buried. So maybe just taking a big sheet of paper and putting it on the wall will give us better performance over the long run. However, we have a rather large list of user request - around 70. And writing up 70 stickies is probably going to become a bigger problem for us than stray bugs.

However, if you set up some viewscreens around the office that displays our JIRA instance we might get the same feedback than from post-it notes. Just a bit more expensive than yellow stickies - but I think they there are some rogue screens laying around anyway :)

After discussing these points with a colleague we arrived at the conclusion that we wanted to try out JIRA in our agile environment. Tom emphasized that we have too many projects, with too many feature requests to effectively handle these on our planning board. We also want our customers to easy access our progress. He had already been trying out VersionOne and ScrumWorks, and neither was quite satisfactory in his opinion. And after a small demonstration of my local JIRA install he felt that we should try it out. So here goes... :)

Advantages:

• Mylyn integration.
• Issue tracking and user stories are in one place.
• Easy to manage large sets of feature requests.
• GreenHopper helps us in the planning phase.
• We can manage several projects in one place, instead of filling up our office with boards.

Disadvantages:

• Technical solutions isn't always easily customizable to your process.
• Duplication of effort if you want billboards/planning boards on your wall to help motivate your developers.

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