Good work; some feature suggestions
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I've been playing around with xpweb for a bit, setting up some stories and tasks for a simple pilot project that will just involve a few people for a couple of weeks. I've also been thinking ahead to the kinds of issues we'll probably have if we use it exclusively for tracking. So I have some suggestions and questions.
A friend of mine made a good (and funny) description of xpweb as it stands: "It has a feeling of a big thundering gymnasium.... with 5 tables set up in it with pamphlets on them." Well, I thought it was pretty funny, and poignant. The basics all seem to be there, and I love the UI. But it seems like it needs some fleshing out. Here's my list:
- It would be nice if there was some sense of knowledge management on the tasks and stories. Any discussions or adjustments on them must happen somewhere else, which means it will get lost. What about adding a comment system, per task and story?
- A similar issue is that there's no email notification. Our current ticketing/task mgmt system uses email notification extensively, and I would hate to do without it. This would mean people could be on cc lists for tasks and stories, and any changes (state changes or comments) would be emailed to the notify list.
- There's no upload facility for the project. I deal with web development, which means there's artifacts that come out of the design process like mockups. It would be nice if this could be uploaded into a per-project file area, rather than just the rather simplistic current set of links.
- A perhaps better alternative to a per-project upload area would be a per-project wiki that can handle binary attachments well. What would you think about integrating twiki or phpwiki, basically some sort of wiki that's robust, has email notification on changes, and supports uploads? It could conceivably be a light integration, even just doing a client-side include of wiki pages plus some basic user database + cclist database synchronization.
- There is sometimes a need to upload something that relates to a task or story and shouldn't be at the project level. Usually this is for bug reports (more on that later), but not always. What about an upload facility or a wiki integration on a per-story/per-task basis?
Now the big one that I'm unsure about: How to handle bug reports. We have a QA department, although it's a small one. I know it's not XP, but it seems to me that even if you view a QA person as a "customer representative" (or you have a real customer who's on the system), how would they communicate bug reports? Even in an XP sense, there might be a set of acceptance tests that fail, but how are the failures communicated and how is the work tracked? Has anybody else dealt with this issue?
If bugs are to be tracked in a real system (i.e. not an Excel spreadsheet), they would need some basic features like more statuses than open/closed and severity levels like major/minor/cosmetic. If you wanted to incorporate bug support, I would vote for adding these extra fields to tasks rather than having external links to bugzilla and dealing with the unpleasant integration issues. Maybe there would just be a per-iteration "bugs" story, or maybe you would have a "bug" object that exists at the same level as "task" objects.
I think there's a lot of potential with xpweb. I hope you consider my suggestions seriously. I don't know how much personal help I can be in implementing it, however, as I have very little time, and I found it hard to navigate through all the object hierarchy in the code (java-style many-file OO setups make me wish I was using an IDE instead of vim).
Hi Steve...
I'm really happy to read such a message...
Let me discuss your suggestions
Im not sure enough about my English to understand your friends description fully. Should I understand theres potential but things should be more interactive? anyway thats a shame I dont get the point because it seems to be a good metaphor :o) Could you enlighten me on that one?
Now, let me tell you one thing about your suggestions: I agree on all of them :o)
- comment tasks and stories: yes, very good idea ;-)
- email notification: yes, very useful too. Though it has to be configurable so that you dont want to be spammed by a bunch of emails I also think the notification should be user based so only project members can be notified
- having upload facilities would probably be a good solution too thought I dont really know how you would deal with rights. But I guess thatd make things more powerful than the very simple link mechanism.
Now, all of this is complicated so I also like your wiki integration idea.
However, even integrating wiki is not trivial. I dont use wiki myself so even though I know it Im not familiar enough with phpwiki or twiki to handle the integration
Finally, bug reports have also been the subject of internal discussions in the team. I think a bug reports integration would be beneficial. But Ive never used such tools as Bugzilla. I think it needs a bit more discussion.
Alright, no need to tell you more; I think you get my point: Im completely with you on all your points but cannot tell you we will implement them soon.
Here is what I proposition: would you like to join the team so that you could at least specify very precisely what has to be done? We have a yahoo discussion group. As were using XP for the project, we could try to prioritize all this enthusiastic tasks and start implementing them.
We all havent much time these days and are very busy finishing the current release. But Im confident well start a new cycle and try to hire more people for coding.
However thatd be very good if you could also do some coding. I know the php code is not always very clear but we tried it ;-) I think the logic part is pretty understandable (the guy being more messy). Im also available to explain anything and can help a lot if you start coding in XPWeb
Btw, use Eclipse for PHP ;-) With this plug-in, youll have a pretty serious IDE: http://www.xored.com/products.php
I definitively consider anybodys suggestions seriously In addition, I agree to yours ;-)
Olivier
Wiki is now integrated with XPWeb.
As for bug reports, it is still a planned to integrate it somehow... stay tuned...
Olivier
Hi Olivier,
As XPWeb takes a fairly unique approach to managing projects I believe that you should focus on that and look to integrate other functionality (bug tracking, documentation, uploads) rather than replicate.....let a bug tracker deal with email notifications....document via a wiki...
It looks like this is what you are doing, so keep up the good work.
XPWeb looks like it could be a good bridge between the end customer and the developers.
Regards,
Jez
Hi Jez,
Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I think you are right, some things must not be reinvented. Some need to, like calendar: I thought I had to build my own "XPWeb like" calendar.
But I expect to focus on more XP planning features in the future.
However, for integrating with other tools, I'd need to know the tools and work on XPWeb too. That'd be good if people would take the time to hack XPWeb to integrate with such tools as bug trackers...
Also, I was thinking about some kind of APIs for exporting with XPWeb... that would be a way, not to integrate tools into XPWeb, but integrate XPWeb into other tools...
Olivier
Hi Jez,
Thanks for your comments. I think indeed that it's important not to reinvent the wheel... something we all do, all the time. But I'll try to focus on "core functionalities". If you have ideas about this needed functionalities, feel free to post!
Olivier