plonewars.com

If you’ve tried the eXtremeManagement tool (or: XM) before, you may
have noticed that it’s not exactly an interaction design masterpiece.
Doing a simple thing like booking your hours for the last week easily
took you a few dozen clicks, and that with a web application that
takes its time to respond. Getting an overview over your iteration
(XM’s loosely based on Extreme Programming ideas) used to be hard
too. Because of the hierarchical way XM lays out iterations, getting
from an project overview to a task that you were interested in would
easily involve three clicks. And that’s for getting an overview.
What if you forgot the details about the task when you were back on
the overview page? Considering that a project easily spans half a
dozen stories per iteration, this was an overview nightmare.

At Jazkarta, we’ve been thinking a lot about what the right project
management tool would be for us. We were fed up with XM and its
sluggishness — one project tried out Trac combined with some booking
plug-in, but it turned out that Trac lacked the project management
view of things, or that we were unable to produce the right reports,
something that the eXtremeManagement tool is considered to do well out
of the box. We looked at other projects and services on the web, but
it looked like XM, despite being sluggish, was still the best thing
there was. (If I had my way, we’d try to strip XP to the bones first
using plain text files and then take it from there in order to
understand what we really need, but well, that idea was ridiculous
to some, and we’ve agreed to stick with XM.)

So, we looked at improving the tool. XM’s trunk now features a
simple expand button in the iteration view that lets you drill down to
tasks. That is, when you’re looking at the listing of stories, you
can click an arrow to see the list of associated tasks inline,
without any loading time. Malthe, a fellow from Jazkarta, thinks it’s
cool:

<malthe>  Oh my god! What happened to XM?
<malthe>  It's a UI revolution!

Another missing link in XM used to be the tracker integration. When
your task was about fixing a bug in the tracker, your XM task would
have no notion of the Poi issue that you’re fixing (– Poi is the
bugtracker that we use). That is, you had to manually take care of
linking the one with the other in the respective text fields, and
that, of course, is more than dull, and it breaks easily (think moving
around tasks in the system) and not doing it meant no good overview of
things.

Now, the way I like to work with XM and Poi is that almost everything
everything that I do goes into an issue. Because Poi has much better
facilities for maintaining a dialogue with the customer, and Poi
issues can have a longer lifetime than tasks — they can be relevant
for more than one iteration. (With stories and tasks that are bound
to an iteration in XM’s model, that’s a bit hairy.)

With the new Poi Task on trunk, connecting tasks with issues finally
makes sense. A Poi Task can be connected to one or more issues. The
view of the Poi Task will show you all the issues that are associated
with it, together with their status (unconfirmed, open, closed, etc.).
On the other side, an issue will show you the tasks it’s associated
with. Plus, we now have a one-click way of adding a task for our
issue to any open story in your project.

The next thing my TODO for the XM tool is gtimelog integration. I
want to be able to retrieve a task list from a XM project, and book my
hours directly from gtimelog. This is by the way how the folks at
Infrae have been booking their hours for a while now into their
in-house timesheet app. This integration will mean that I’ll no
longer need to write down my hours into three different places by
hand.

So… If you’re looking for a project management tool that’s flexible
and XP, or if you’ve looked at XM before and you thought it’s dull or
doesn’t give you enough overview, try it (again). I think it’s grown
to quite a usable solution for project management. By the way, thanks
to Zest and Jazkarta for supporting this work.