Daniel Nouri's Blog

If you've tried the eXtremeManagement tool (or: XM) before, you may have noticed that it's not exactly an interaction design masterpiece. Doing a simple thing like booking your hours for the last week easily took you a few dozen clicks, and that with a web application that takes its time to respond. Getting an overview over your iteration (XM's loosely based on Extreme Programming ideas) used to be hard too. Because of the hierarchical way XM lays out iterations, getting from an project overview to a task that you were interested in would easily involve three clicks. And that's for getting an overview. What if you forgot the details about the task when you were back on the overview page? Considering that a project easily spans half a dozen stories per iteration, this was an overview nightmare.

At Jazkarta, we've been thinking a lot about what the right project management tool would be for us. We were fed up with XM and its sluggishness -- one project tried out Trac combined with some booking plug-in, but it turned out that Trac lacked the project management view of things, or that we were unable to produce the right reports, something that the eXtremeManagement tool is considered to do well out of the box. We looked at other projects and services on the web, but it looked like XM, despite being sluggish, was still the best thing there was. (If I had my way, we'd try to strip XP to the bones first, not thinking about existing tools, and try to understand the process more before we try to modify it.)

So, we looked at improving the tool. XM's trunk now features a simple expand button in the iteration view that lets you drill down to tasks. That is, when you're looking at the listing of stories, you can click an arrow to see the list of associated tasks inline, without any loading time. Malthe, a fellow from Jazkarta, thinks it's cool:

<malthe>  Oh my god! What happened to XM?
<malthe>  It's a UI revolution!

Another missing link in XM used to be the tracker integration. When your task was about fixing a bug in the tracker, your XM task would have no notion of the Poi issue that you were fixing (-- Poi is the bugtracker that we use). Consequently, you had to manually take care of linking the one with the other in the respective text fields, and that, of course, is more than dull, and it breaks easily (think moving around tasks in the system) and not doing it meant no good overview of things.

Now, the way I like to work with XM and Poi is that almost everything everything that I do goes into an issue. Because Poi has much better facilities for maintaining a dialogue with the customer, and Poi issues can have a longer lifetime than tasks -- they can be relevant for more than one iteration. (With stories and tasks that are bound to an iteration in XM's model, that's a bit hairy.)

With the new Poi Task on trunk, connecting tasks with issues finally makes sense. A Poi Task can be connected to one or more issues. The view of the Poi Task will show you all the issues that are associated with it, together with their status (unconfirmed, open, closed, etc.). On the other side, an issue will show you the tasks it's associated with. Plus, you now have a one-click way of adding a task for our issue to any open story in your project.

Also, Poi trunk now has auto-linking to other issues and Trac. Like in Trac itself, you can now simply write #123 in your report and get a link to that issue. The same goes for r123 and revisions in Trac.

The next thing my TODO for the XM tool is gtimelog integration. I want to be able to retrieve a task list from a XM project, and book my hours directly from gtimelog. This is by the way how the folks at Infrae have been booking their hours for a while now into their in-house timesheet app. This integration will mean that I'll no longer need to write down my hours into three different places by hand.

So... If you're looking for a project management tool that's flexible and XP, or if you've looked at XM before and you thought it's dull or doesn't give you enough overview, try it (again). I think it's grown to quite a usable solution for project management. By the way, thanks to Zest and Jazkarta for supporting this work.