[Pdx-pm] XP Project Management Tool

[Michael G Schwern]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 11:55:05AM -0800, publiustemp-pdxpm at yahoo.com wrote:
> Someone on this list (Schwern?) was telling me about an XP project
> management tool they were using, but I can't recall the name of it. 
> Can anyone make recommendations?  Preferably it would be something that
> fits well with XP philosophy (thus ruling out MS Project and similar
> things.)

XPlanner.
http://www.xplanner.org

The screenshots pretty much say it all (though I believe those are still a
few versions behind).
http://www.xplanner.org/screenshots.html

Particularly this one.
http://www.xplanner.org/images/screenshots/statistics.jpg

Red is work done on this iteration.  Blue is work estimated on this iteration.
Your estimates are continually updated over the course of the iteration.
If you blow over an estimate XPlanner makes you reestimate upwards.

When the two lines meet, you're done.  You can do clever extrapolations
of the curves to figure out when they will meet to provide an estimate for
this iteration.

If the blue line is going up, either your estimates were wrong or you've
been adding tasks to the iteration.

If the lines aren't converging you'll never finish.

This is a great graphic to show to a manager. "Look, if you keep piling on
features we'll never get this thing done!"


And there's a SOAP interface so you can automate access to it.  
http://www.xplanner.org/soap.html

And some intrepid soul deserving of our unending praise wrote the beginnings
of a Perl module to talk to it.
http://search.cpan.org/dist/XPlanner/


PS  Its in Java and needs Jakarta (ie. Tomcat).  I got it running on Linux 
without too much trouble.  The trick is it needs Tomcat >= 5.  I think I 
also used Sun's JVM.


-- 
Michael G Schwern        schwern at pobox.com  http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
Try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo.