[teampractices] Mingle

[Steven Walling]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 8:04 AM, Toby Negrin <tnegrin at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> The analytics team has tried really hard to use Mingle as our agile
> planning tool but we've reached the point where the ROI just isn't there
> and we need to re-assess our use of it.
>
> I'm looking for some feedback from teams that have migrated from Mingle --
> primarily what did you migrate to and are you happy with the decision to
> move.
>
> Ultimately, we'd like to use whatever the Foundation agrees on but in the
> short term we need to make some choices.
>

The Growth team migrated to Trello from Mingle more than a year ago and
we're much happier. IIRC we actually quit using a specialized tool in
between, and just did wiki documentation for everything. Mingle just has
terrible UX, and Trello works much better for a cross-functional team doing
lighter small-a agile work. I think the Research & Data side of the
Analytics team is also already using Trello (correct?).

Trello is great, but it just doesn't do points estimation and reporting
without some hacks. I would recommend that the Analytics migrate to it
anyway, with the big caveat that we may want to explore encouraging all
teams *slowly* and surely to switch to Phabricator (test instance at
fab.wmflabs.org). That's a long term decision based on the results of the
project management tools review though, and with blockers in Ops and
Platform to support migration, etc. It will be discussed both on
mediawiki.org and in Zurch at the hackathon, so if Analytics team members
can I would encourage participation in both venues. In any case, the good
side of Trello is that we can download/export our data as needed, and it's
lightweight enough that a short term switch to it will not be that painful
even if in another six-twelve months you might want to switch again.

Let me know if I can help Analytics set up Trello (I am an admin on our WMF
account there). The tool is much more flexible to configure than Mingle,
and I could walk you through some of the options.

-- 
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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