This post is part 2 of a series: [ Part 1 | ]
I’m making myself an Home Assistant application so I’ll need to structure my development a bit. I looked a bit for an online project management tool that was free, supported an agile workflow with little or no ceremony. Since I’m hosting the code at Github I thought about using the issue tracker there, but I found it lacking. It, and many others, were geared towards bug tracking, not feature management. AgileZen looked really good but I couldn’t find a way to allow anonymous users to view the project. Since I want to do this in a as transparent way as possible, that’s a must. I want everyone that follows the series to also be able to follow the project management.
Several other good solutions were not available in a hosted version. I wanted to try Jira but the free or open-source licenses were not available as a hosted version.
Pivotal Tracker was suggested and it looked very good, but I found a FAQ-item that stated that only people invited to the project could see any information turned me off that too. Luckily I twittered this and they responded! Twitter to the rescue again! Of course, if I’d have read the FAQ properly I would have found that too in the FAQ…
So now I have a Pivotal Tracker project set up for my Home Assistant where I can enter my work items. Pivotal Tracker seems like a pretty good tool for this, I especially like the keyboard shortcuts! It’s an easy and low friction tool for managing my user stories and tracking what I’ve done.
Pivotal Tracker has the concept of placing work, or stories, in one of four columns, Done, Current, Backlog and Icebox. Work starts in the Icebox as general stuff you want to do (I visualize an Icebox filled with story cards). When the user stories are moved over in the backlog I can prioritize them. I can assign a story 1 – 3 points, depending on it’s complexity or work and Pivotal Tracker also estimates how much work I should be able to do in an iteration (the defaults are 10 points and one week iteration). This automatically fills my Current column. And when I’m done with a story it moves into the Done column. When you first open http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/28621 the Icebox column is off, click it to show it. You should, because a lot of my stories will be there.
As you can see I’ve created some user stories in the icebox and dragged some over in the backlog. I write my user stories in the form
As a [role]
I want to [action]
So that [benefit]
I particulary like the [benefit] part, since that allows me to focus on why the customer wants this feature and that helps me focus the work I do.
Some features have a looser description, such as “Create lists” or “Schedules”, these are things that I have on the plan but I don’t want to waste time estimating these yet, following the principle of delaying those decisions to the last responsible moment. They are mostly placeholders for stuff I want to do and to help me when I have to make decisions that might affect other plans.
For now, I’ve elaborated a bit on the Task stories and will get cracking on those next.