[teampractices] Mingle

[S Page]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Arthur Richards
<arichards at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> The Flow team has migrated from Mingle to Trello. They may be able to
> provide some insight - and I am personally generally interested to hear
> about what the migration was like and how the team feels about the switch.
>

I liked Mingle. It does a lot; you can quite easily tinker with how it
works; you can model "epic stories", and related bugs and tasks. But:
1. Managing workflows was a pain, people would have problems dragging cards
in an unexpected direction so someone with admin rights would just edit
fields and lose the automatic owner assignment and date updates.
2. Non-engineers just couldn't get into it.  They don't want to navigate
multiple views in a tool they only use once or twice a day.
3. The Flow team never got to projecting velocity or burn-down, so Mingle's
analytical data and graphing was of no value.

Trello is fun and friendly. Simply showing an attached image at the top of
a card is a huge win. I haven't turned on the Chrome story point extension.
Trello's limitation is it can't organize cards into bigger stories; you can
have a checklist that refers to other cards, but that's about it.

With either tool, integration with gerrit and bugzilla is lacking.
Engineers +2 in gerrit and yet Mingle/Trello doesn't update and move into
Testing; someone reopens a bug and the card doesn't move out of
Testing/Done.

The migration from Mingle to Trello was fiddly. I found a Google App script
+ spreadsheet<https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AobiYOLgWgpBdHNKRDZTbF9pbDJQQUgzTjVIQlp1R1E#gid=0>that
can create Trello cards from a spreadsheet. So I exported groups of
Mingle cards, pasted them into this spreadsheet, then did a lot of
hand-editing and some spreadsheet functions to provide the fields the
script wanted, then ran the script in the spreadsheet. I should have built
an intermediate step to convert individual Mingle descriptions in HTML into
Trello's markdown.  I have
notes<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Team/Processes/Project_management>
.

-- 
=S Page  Features engineer
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