Re: [Xpcgi-devel] Hi Joe

[Joi E. <gy...@is...>]

On Sat, 5 May 2001, Nick Fortescue wrote:

>Date: Sat, 5 May 2001 15:39:27 +0100
>From: Nick Fortescue <nic...@sm...>
>To: xpc...@li...
>Subject: [Xpcgi-devel] Hi Joe
>
>Looks like there's just the two of us on the list at the moment, but I
>thought I'd use the list so it gets archived. XPCGI looks quite handy for
>us. I wondered how/whether you would like additional requests and stories
>given to you, via this list, or some other way. Anyway, some more stories
>for you.

If you visit the project's Home Page, there's a link XPCGI in Action
which leads to a functional installation of XPCGI which contains XPCGI's
own story cards.  There is also a Playground project and a few others
people have created.  Feel free to input your own stories!

>1) The user should be able to say move the rank/priority of this story up or
>down, and it swaps rank/priorities with the story above/below it, keeping a
>list structure. Make top rank, and make bottom rank would also be nice.
>Note: a pile of task cards is precisely that, a pile, not with fixed
>priorities and then sorted. It's a lot easier to shuffle cards about that
>editing the priorities by hand, and trying to guess a number which puts it
>where you want.

The rank is a computed field based on the user's priority and the
engineering risk value.  The story owner isn't supposed to alter the
enginering risk, but they could adjust the priority up or down.  That
could be used to make the cards adjust position.

>2) It would be nice to take the current estimated stories, velocities, the
>story estimates and ranks, and produce a timeline, projecting into the
>future of which stories will be done when.

That shouldn't be difficult.  How about a 'project velocity' field on
the project card which can be set at any time? It'd be used whenever 
the timeline was requested.

>3) As for 2, but you can also view completed stories

Hm. How would you do this?  Just list the completed stories sorted by
completion date at the start of the timeline?

>4) Store the data to a proper database, like MySQL, rather than flat files.

Why?  This isn't a user story, it's an engineering decision.  And, GDBM
*is* a proper database.  Besides, I can't run MySQL on my ISP, and 
SourceForge's web server doesn't support what XPCGI uses.

>I feel bad asking you to do work and I'd like to be able to help, especially
>if it makes it happen faster, but I'm not a perl programmer. Let me know if
>there is anything I can do.

What languages do you know?  If you know Java, I'd love to have someone
create the beginnings of a unit test harness using HTTPUNit, a test
framework based upon JUnit.  I use JUnit daily at work, I'm just not 
familiar with HTTPUnit.

-- 
Joi Ellis
gy...@no..., http://www.visi.com/~gyles19/