Agilopolis Community Day 4 - Meeting Summary

Posted Fri, 10/23/2009 - 02:52 by admin

Meeting place: Research&Engineering Center, Wroclaw, Strzegomska 46A,
Date & Time: 18:00, 22.10.2009
Duration: 2,0 hours

Meeting Summary:
Marcin presented real examples and tinyPM at work. Moreover, there were some cooking secretes related to how it is developed and about its philosophy.
There was also very interesting discussion regarding 'agile in corporation'. Maybe a good topic for next meeting? (maybe Tomasz will volunteer :)?)
The meeting was closed with drawing of prizes provided by Marcin.

tinyPM:
What is so special about this tooling, is that it is not focused on any concrete methodology. It provides some framework to do agile, however, user is not restricted to use any approach that can be imagined. It is so different from 'agile in corporation' that this presentaton was really a refreshment from day to day life. There was also a nice discussion around this topic (corporation versus agile) and most of the questions were related to so called 'corporate features': how to generate statistics, plan the project, include testing status or provide summary reports. Such features are not available since it is no in scope of the tool, which is very effective in its core use: agile development.

Such approach is also visible in market target: small to medium enterprises (20-30 people)

Tooling consists of four basic elements:

  • Projects
  • iterations
  • user stories
  • tasks

There are additional elements like timesheets but it is supporting functionality for the core ones.
Interesting remark was done by one of the participants that there is no such field as 'business value'! Marcin's answer was that it was never requested which more or less mean that it is actually not used in agile projects!

At the moment, project is actively developed by 2 people and is based on SEAM framework. Initially it was based on spring however it was to cumbersome and finally replaced.

Next steps in development is to provide integration with Jira and continiues integration tooling and introduce a new concept of 'idea log' (more high level backlog).

tinyPM is free up to 5 users, above that there is monthly fee of 12,5E.

Hope to see you on next Agilopolis Community Day!

btw. some pictures from ACC4

Best regards,
Your Agilopolis Team

Comments

Ideas for the next ACD

by Marcin Niebudek - 11/03/2009 - 12:50

Tomek already mentioned it, but I will stress it once again (count it as my vote for those ideas). I personally would like to hear about two things:

  • Corporate PM role during and after agile transition in the organisation. How his work changes, what are his new responsibilities, what information interests him as a feedback loop from Agile/Scrum teams?
  • Business value. How it is used? How it is defined and estimated? Finally how it is mesured? What role it plays in the planning and evaluation of agile projects?

These are two things that emerged from our last discussion. Maybe someone would like to share some ideas as a base for more detailed discussion?

Regards,
Marcin

tinyPM feedback comments

by Marcin Niebudek - 10/29/2009 - 09:12

Here is the feedback that we've gathered at the end of tinyPM demo session:

  • tasks estimation and iteration burndown based on tasks (3 votes)
  • reporting (2 votes)
  • value and risk within product backlog
  • release plan
  • summary overview on project status, preferably on some good diagram
  • program management as a group of projects with shared state view
  • some more "corporative" project manager oriented view
  • tester workflow support
  • use space taken by application logo to present some useful data
  • time tracking is not a good direction as it's non agile and creates a feeling of control
  • mail server integrations may be rarly used option as people like to click through the nice looking apps instead of writing e-mails
  • task templates for story (more than one default task)
  • domain / ldap integration for user accounts
  • would be nice if it would be possible to export time entries from tinyPM's timesheet to external timetrackig tools so that we don't need to enter it twice

Thank you all for sharing it with us,
tinyPM Dev Team