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Hi!

I work for a company that is interested in an issue tracking system capable of Agile modeling (tasks rolled up into stories rolled up into iterations, etc).  Specifically, we'd like something capable of tracking the time estimates for specific tasks (and having the stories automatically update their time estimates to be the sum of their issues; and the same for iterations updating their estimates to be the sum of their stories).

I was wondering if anyone out there has attempted to use Gemini for such a purpose.  Two uses immediately come to mind, but are flawed:

a) one could implement the iteration/story/task model using (project or release)/component/issue.  This will get you the hierarchy you're looking for, but it doesn't appear to me that anything about the component entry can really be customized.  You can log time estimates in the issues just fine, but you are seemingly incapable of having a component with a 'time requirement' equal to all issues corresponding to it.  The same seems to apply to the iteration listing.

b) alternatively, one could simply label all aspects of the development (tasks, stories, and iterations) as issues within Gemini.  Simply give an iteration outbound 'related to' links to its stories, and give stories outbound 'related to' links to their tasks.  This could work; it's not pretty, but at least you could assign time estimates to stories and iterations easily.

We are looking, ideally, for something a little cleaner than b) that allows stories and iterations to update their time estimates when their composing tasks and stories, respectively, are changed.  Something like a) that allowed components/releases to track time automatically would be wonderful, too.

Has anybody tried anything like this?  If so, please offer me some feedback on it!  If it's at all possible, I'd rather have the company continue to use Gemini for its new development practices than have to switch to something like XPlanner.

(now, if we could somehow have both in one app, that'd be a dream come true. :) )

Thanks for your help!
Chris

edited for a ps: if it is relevant information, we are currently using 2.2.6.  Thanks!

I will get back to you next week with my thoughts.

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Harvey Kandola
CounterSoft™

Sounds great.  Thanks so much for the quick response!

-Chris

We're doing this at the moment. 

We don't worry too much about the components here.  We have a set of issues of type Feature, which represent a high level view on what we are trying to achieve for the customer.  At the end of the feature identification, we break these down into the stories - (issue type Story).  We're expecting that at some point we may end up promoting completed features to components, but at the moment it works fine.

We relate the story issues to the feature issues via related tags, and extract customer reports to report on total time per feature.  We don't break down as far as tasks, but that's only because we haven't needed to.

For releases, we build a number of releases at the start, 1.0.1.x, 1.0.2.x, 1.0.3.x etc.  where the increment is the iteration.  CruiseControl is set up to use the iteration number in the same way.  To identify the stories for the release we assign them to a .x release, and then on release date, actually update the release tag to the correct build number in cruise control.  This way we get both the road map, and the release notes.

Logging time we don't really do, we're more interested at the moment in estimating effort and tracking completion.  (Planning Poker).  We do have some custom reports where we roll these estimates up to the feature level.

We're also moving to 3.0, where I was hoping to get different workflows for each issue type,  something the documentation says it does, but I can't quite figure out.

Something to note though - don't boil the ocean.  Work out the minimum amount of functionality you can start with that will add value and go with that.  Sure - have a long term view, but don't try and get it perfect first up.  It will change.

Hi there!

Any update on this issue?  We'd love to use Gemini for proper Agile development.

-Chris

Hi Chris,

I love gemini myself but I think it's a lot to expect to try to bend it to do scrum / agile planning and tracking.  Have you looked into ScrumWorks basic?  It a free edition.  The only thing the free version is missing is some extra management reporting.  But it lets you set up your iterations they way you describe.  We actually use target process (paid for this thing.. about $30 a user) but it is very cool.  We also use Gemini as our bug tracking system. 

Have fun,

Marty