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Manage the agile team with XPlanner

How can XPlanner assist your agile team to achieve peak performance?

By David Elliot and Justin Smith, JavaWorld.com, 08/15/05

Scope, design, build, test, deliver, apologize. These are the oft trodden steps of a traditional engineering methodology when applied to the mercurial world of software projects. As a software developer you're probably well acquainted with that "final" system requirement that seems to duck and weave like a prize fighter. Perhaps you've toiled on a development project only to emerge months (or years) later to face a customer who seems profoundly disappointed that its real needs haven't been met. Perhaps your peers are at the point where a meticulous long range development plan placed before them instills a sense of impending doom. Bottom line—your team is ready to go with agile development, but has your traditional team management tool been hardwired for traditional team management?

The agile methodologies may be lightweight, but they are highly disciplined. Any tool that supports you in planning and tracking rapid deliveries with intimate customer collaboration can make a valuable addition to your arsenal. The good news is that several such tools are now available to the agile team. This article details a real-world experience in managing an agile development team using one of this new breed of tools, the open source XPlanner.

XPlanner is a Java Web application designed to support team management according to the extreme programming methodology (XP). However, we have found this tool to be flexible enough to provide valuable support for other mainstream agile approaches (e.g., Scrum) in the heat of project delivery. Although unsophisticated, XPlanner provides a handy tool to support your team whether you are experienced with, or just launching into, the rewarding world of agile software development.

Traditional vs. agile team management tools

Traditional team management tools (such as Microsoft's Project) are based upon work breakdown structures that look far into a project's future. Planned allocation of resources and a careful eye on variance to baseline are used to manage the "critical path" to final delivery. The application of such tools implies substantial upfront planning efforts, rigid task dependencies, and a stable base of requirements. Significant changes to scope or requirements are likely to necessitate significant revisions to the model. Thus, these traditional tools are most appropriate when planning a journey from A to B, assuming little variation in course. In contrast, agile projects are geared to expect change, making no assumption that B is even to be the final destination.

In understanding the culture of the agile project, it is useful to consider the tenets of agile development as espoused by the authors of the Agile Manifesto:

• "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan"
  (Kent Beck et al., 2001)

Thus, agile projects explicitly abandon long-term planning in favor of intimate stakeholder engagement, clear focus on high value features, and releasing usable software early and often. The underlying goal is to simply and effectively deliver value in the face of constant change. For a planning and tracking tool to be valuable in this context, it must be congruous with these values.

 

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