Just so’s you know, things are jumping at Project Flow & Tracker:
- Even though we are still in pre-Alpha, over 50 people have signed up to work on their projects, with the aim of benefitting from an agile, test-driven approach tailored to website applications (see Roadmap below).
- There’s a “stop the music”* podcast on how to set up your project so as to take advantage of the PFT “forest and the trees” content navigation model.
- I just sent out a Roadmap for April, 2009 to all those who have signed up as product owners to work on their projects online. Reproduced below.
So there you have it folks, short and sweet. Remember: for every 1000 hours you and your client (their work counts too) spend working on a project, 400 at least should be spent on writing and running functional acceptance tests. Sound like too much? You need… Project Flow & Tracker.
Roadmap for April, 2009
[reproduced from the PFT site]
Hi all.
I hope you are working on your project hierarchies, which will allow you to quickly navigate through your project, drilling down and zooming out as the need arises.
After working so hard to get your hierarchies organized, you deserve to be able to visualize them. So that’s what I am going to be working on this month, a set of easy visual user story and task boards and burndown charts.
With this addition, PFT will be moving into Alpha, and will already become a quite useful tool in its own right.
Afterwards, top priorities continue to be:
- Easy access to relevant portions of fully functional prototype/test/production sites directly from the project, directly from the relevant user stories.
- Drill down to commits via the Version Control API to obtain full bi-directional traceability from requirements to code and back again, and to be able to set up “searchlight” reports that show the code touched by a given user story.
- Publication of PFT as an installation profile on drupal.org, where it will always be free as in beer and speech.
- More and better podcasts / documentation.
- On-line forums on the Project Flow & Tracker site.
- Interface improvements.
- Integration with Selenium and/or other automated functional testing frameworks.
- Nagios monitoring with your test/production sites.
Medium and longer term goals are:
- Move on to Beta functionality as per plans.
- Full integration with Drupal project and project issue family of modules.
- Full integration with Drupal hosting, provisioning and deployment modules (whatever they turn out to be… 🙂 actually the Aegir family is starting to look pretty good, we are testing it out already.
- Project Flow & Tracker mentoring service for large-scale projects.
(*) Those are the perhaps unintelligible three words which preface this and all PFT podcasts, as a protest against all that irritating pseudo light-hearted elevator music and chuckling you have to listen to for half an hour on some Drupal podcasts before you can get to the nitty-gritty, however valuable that might be.