We needed to organise our development sprints, we could not find the perfect solution... so we built our own.

At Tribalogic we use the Agile methodology for our development - planning detailed work no more than one week in advance.  This means:

  • weekly development sprints; and
  • releasing updates to our Platform roughly every three weeks.

Trac has been our main organisational tool but we needed something to help us work as a team and communicate with our clients.

Basic requirements

  • a list of tasks we could all create, edit and view as a team
  • a way of organising our weekly sprints
  • show clients what we are up to in relation to their tasks

We looked at various 3rd party products such as Jira, agile zen, Planbox, Mavenlink & Pivotal Tracker.  They all have great features and could work well especially using them from the start of a project.

But none of them were quite working for us... 

Building our own

We realised that the Tribalogic Platform could be moulded into a great agile development tool so we set about making some changes that would let this happen.

A "dev tickets" menu

In the Admin Console, we added "dev tickets" into the user menu.  

admin-console-user-menu

Our clients can now view the tasks that we are doing from them right within the Platform Admin Console that they log into every day.

The clever bit is that we have done it in such a way that we can now easily place all sorts of things in the user menu if we choose... which may come in handy later.

An overview of the current sprint / week

To visualise our weekly sprints, we created a Sprint Board.  

sprint-board

The Sprint Board is used to:

  • show the current sprint/week's activity
  • allow prioritisation of the Backlog 

The advantages of using our own software

As a software company, we are in the advantageous position of having the resources to build our own project management tools.  We can refine and alter them as we see fit.

As the expression goes we are "eating our own dog food" on a daily basis so that will force us to refine our interfaces which will have direct benefits to our clients.