On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Terry Chay <tchay(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
I'm against changing things mid-stream. Let's
see if Mingle works out for
Flow (which hasn't started), and then we can see about its use elsewhere.
Trello has worked out very well for E3 (as well as being valuable for the
early development of Echo), and I'm not mandating E2 be backporting its use
to Page Curation. ;-)
Overall my experience with teams across the org has been:
- Using an agile PM tool becomes valuable at a team size of about 4+
developers. At smaller team sizes more lightweight tools often work
better.
- Mingle's worked well for most teams that have stuck with it and are
at the above size. Mobile's made improvements to integrate Bugzilla
reports into Mingle so that they automatically create cards, which
reduces the transaction cost somewhat.
- Mingle provides a lot of powerful features that make the effort
invested in maintaining the cards worth it, including things like
highly customized feeds, notifications and filters. It's also handy
for remote folks to have a lot of visibility into a team's work.
- Our Mingle instance is world-readable, so as long as you're
comfortable navigating swimlanes you can figure out what's going on
and have access to the same filters and views as everyone else.
Terry, Tomasz, Gayle and I have been talking about more
practice-sharing across the org and are thinking about a workshop with
Tom and Arthur around early July, where the Flow team could
potentially be a pilot in learning from what mobile's been doing, and
then decide which of those methods to adopt in practice.
Obviously I hear the concerns about free software, but like I said
before, I have yet to see a tool that's actually carefully designed
around agile development practices (as opposed to plugins being
retrofitted into bug trackers and conventional PM tools). With that
said, we've not mandated use of Mingle or any other tool because teams
have to figure out what works for them. And continuous
experimentation with tools available in the open source space is
obviously good. :)
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation