Agile basically means getting it done right. It does for getting it done what object oriented analysis, design and programming does for software: it divides all the complexity into bite-sized chunks.
So if your project is set up right, you find yourself bleary eyed in the saddle on a Monday morn, with the definite idea of putting your shoulder to the wheel, but without any idea at all of where (it costs too much to redo the thinking five times); but you can fire up something (whether it's a spreadsheet, a sophisticated application, dotproject, whatever), but you got yourself a Google map on all your clients, projects, phases, milestones, tasks, tests, days, so you can Zoom out and dizzyingly zoom in on what you got to do right now. Then at some point soon, and the easier the better, the lowest cost in pain and time the better, at some time you have the equivalent of a pile of tasks to do, that you can just do and cross off as having been done and you have that sweet feeling of having really moved along.
So over the past couple of years I have been working on web applications using the Drupal CMS as a web application framework, and I have used a lot of project and configuration management tools in the past. But excited about a year ago with using Drupal itself as a project management tool and a rapid prototyping tool at the same time, I developed the Project Flow and Tracker, designed to be a Drupal installation profile (in case that doesn't translate instantly and intuitively into something for you, it is a downloadable Drupal, which, when you download it and install it, will become a Project Flow and Tracker instead of just a plain vanilla Drupal installation).
So I went to Barcelona DrupalCon in late 2007 and gave a presentation on it and got a lot of really cool feedback. And, I actually used it with some clients, and got a lot of really useful feedback there.
Enough time has passed for a couple of things to happen:
Drupal itself is much more powerful (panels 2, nodequeue, jquery ...) and the ideas have had some time to mature pretty well.
So now I want to take the Project Flow and Tracker apart and put it back together again. I need to reverse engineer it and implement it again, into something super usable and which I hope will constitute a cool contribution to the Drupal community.
So there will be three big parts to this treatise, dear reader: An Intro, dealing with how to get involved in helping the shiny new Project Flow and Tracker become a reality soon enough for people to actually use it; an ongoing report on that process of development; and a section on how to use it, perhaps including a case study. And a couple of appendices thrown in on process engineering background, and so on and so forth.
If you have read this far, please feel free to contact me whenever you like on anything related to Project Flow and Tracker.
Let's get started.
Project Flow and Tracker is an agile process tracker built on Drupal.
Please visit the PFT Sandbox (reset to sanity once every 24 hours).
User: drupal
Password: rocks
Please see documentation for an in-depth explanation.
Or contact me directly.
Somewhat outdated, but kind of fun, just to get your head wrapped around the why's and wherefore's, here it is.
So this is a guide of using the old Process Flow and Tracker to re-engineer Process Flow and tracker.
Thanks to this, this page is nothing more than a bookmark.
Check out the workflow we will be following.
Check out the roles.
Check out the user stories.
Check out the project iterations (and the user stories assigned to each).
Then check out where we are right now: