On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Terry Chay tchay@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