REVERT TO CONSOLE

This is a follow up article to First Steps Toward a More Managed Process I wrote at the end of last month.
I’ve been using Trac with the Timing and Estimation plugin now for about a month. I tried to promote it to my team for our next product but they never considered it and instead we’re using XPlanner. XPlanner is still a 100% improvement over the tool we used before, which was called the nothing whatsoever tool.

In my opinion Trac does everything that XPlanner does plus includes about 10 more useful features… such as Subversion integration, Bugzilla integration, dozens of useful reports, exporting out of the box to comma-delimited and tab-delimited text files, ical integration, rss feeds… plus Trac can be deployed as a standalone app (as I have done on my desktop), or integrated with a number of different backends and frontends. XPlanner uses MySQL. I’m really beginning to think Java is far behind in web development, and the community is growing fatter and wider (re: hibernate+spring+whatever bloated front-end) rather than slimming down and actually innovating like Python & PHP (simple extensible frameworks)… but I digress… I’m really just here to talk about the first month of implementing my own managed process.

In short, Trac has helped me manage a list, but I still haven’t reached the managed process nirvana I strive for.

What I’ve done with Trac:

• I’ve separated my work projects into different Trac components. I am currently working on 3 different components. One is in QA, another is being maintained, and a 3rd is new development. So I’ve been successful at managing these components and managing my tasks for each.
• I’ve mapped the Iterations to Trac Milestones. This is really slick because Trac provides a nice RoadMap and Timeline reports for work by Milestone.
• Each task I call one of the three out of the box Trac types; either a defect, enhancement, or task.
• The only piece I haven’t really figured out the best way to use is the Trac version. Since where I’m currently working milestones/iterations are also versions, it’s not like I could have a version 2 of iteration 3. I tried to coordinate a version with a use case code, but that hasn’t turned out to be effective.
• I made use of Trac priorities, which create nice color-coded reports.
• I didn’t make enough use of the timing and estimation plugin. I need to do that next month.

Going forward:

Going forward I’m moving to a monthly milestone. Since XPlanner will track iterations, I’d like to use Trac to manage my own tasks and velocity. I see this as a shift away from a project planner, to more of a personal planner. I’d like to track my tasks, my own velocity on a project, and keep notes for each independent of what the project planning app is doing.