Summary

Today’s post is a short one about a free project planning and task management product that our test team has begun using.  Links to other free alternatives are provided here as well.

Background

A while back some of you might remember me posting about how the online testing community had helped solve our task management problem.  The problem being that we had no suitable means of keeping track of our task backlog.

A few kind people at the Software Testing Club had provided a few suggestions for our team to try out.  Rob Lambert’s suggestion of Pivotal Tracker being the one we decided to use in the end.

Last month I got an email through from Pivotal to inform me that they would be changing their product from a free offering, to a low cost option.  I can’t say I was surprised, and due to Pivotal’s popularity it must have been costing them quite a bit to run.

So of course it left our team with a dilemma of either paying for this service or looking for some other free alternatives.

So I sent a message out on Twitter asking the testing community for help and four quick responses:

• Del Dewar suggested Teamlab
• Martin Jansson suggested Redmine & Trac
• Rob Lambert suggested Trac
• Stephen Hill suggested Mantis

TeamLab

All excellent suggestions and I had a quick look at each of them.  Teamlab stood out above all others and to be honest I really couldn’t believe that it was free!  Not only does it look good and have a vast array of features, it’s also very polished.  What I liked as well was that they are very open to suggestions for improvement from their users, a few suggestions having already been included or planned in for later releases.

Community Portal

The application is web based and comes in two main sections.  The first is the TM Community portal which presents a dashboard view of events, polls, members, wiki, blogs and forums.  Which although very nice and polished provides functionality that most will already have setup via another application or not need e.g. wiki, blog, forums.  However if you were looking to consolidate all these into one application, then this could be an excellent solution for you.  It’s also very customisable, you can add and remove widgets from the dashboard with ease.

Project portal

The other main section is TM Projects, which allows you to create multiple different projects.  Each project can have it’s own tasks and milestones.  Our current usage of the projects section is to manage our task backlog and to plan upcoming maintenance releases.

Again TM Projects has a handy little dashboard view which uses widgets which can be added or removed just like in the TM Community portal.  I quite like the discussions feature of TM projects as it allows for an area to update members on a project with relevant information such as changes to scope, plans, stakeholder details and so on.

Being able to add multiple milestones to a project is excellent.  It allows you to bind tasks to a milestone and priorities them.   Even simple little things like members having an avatar just make the look and feel of the product very clean and polished.

Hosting

Best of all, should you not want your information available out-with your own network you could choose to download and install the application locally.  We went for the SaaS solution though which gives you everything pre set-up after a very quick registration process.  It also provided us with a very easy to remember web address which is in the format of yourname.teamlab.com

Features

Here’s a quick summary of its current features:

TMCommunity

• Teams
• Events
• Blogs
• Forums
• Photos
• Wiki
• Bookmarks

TMProject

• Projects
• Tasks
• Milestones
• Discussions
• File repository
• Time tracking
• Reports

Chat

• Team chat
• Integration with popular chat clients

The fact is I’ve been so impressed with this product I’ve offered to assist them as a software tester free of charge.  Hopefully I’ll get to play a key part in it’s success in the future.  If you’re looking for software to help you with project planning or task management give it a try and let me know your thoughts.

Thanks once again to Del, Martin, Rob and Stephen for their help in providing our team with a free solution to our task management and planning problem.  Hopefully from sharing this information I’ll have helped some others in the same situation.

Task management has been something our team has never really had a good solution for.  Sure we had no problem dishing out tasks, but collating all those task’s into one repository often proved difficult.  We’d tried wiki’s, remember the milk & considered pick charts, but nothing really fitted well.

Surely our massive testing community would have some idea’s?  So I dropped a question into the wonderful Software Testing Club & got a very quick response & a few potential solutions from Rob Lambert & Stephen Hill.

Rob Lambert suggested giving Pivotal Tracker a try stating he’d been through hundreds of task management systems and found this to be the best.  Cool, it was free & used a virtual drag & drop storyboard format that was familiar with tools such as Mingle & Jira that we’d used and enjoyed in the past.  This looked interesting & worth a try.

So we commenced a two week trial, using Pivotal to track tasks for a milestone test phase our team were about to take.

Getting the task’s into Pivotal was very easy, the interface was very simple to use.  We could add a story as a feature which could have an estimate associated with it, we could also add them as bugs, chores or release markers.  It also had the option to import existing tasks from another application using CSV files, obviously the format of these would need to be corrected to match pivotals.  It also had integration capabilities so if we had to hook this into our bug tracking system at a later date we could.

Members in the team could be kept up to date with the progress of tasks & be alerted when new tasks got added either by email or from an RSS feed.

The biggest downside I could find was the fact that for each new project you created you’d have to re-add each member individually, if we could create a group of users that could be assigned to new projects it would save this hassle.  Auto completion on browsers helps this & as our team wasn’t huge it didn’t prove to be that big a deal.

The biggest test of Pivotal would be how the rest of the team enjoyed using it & they did, mostly due to the simplicity of it & ease of use.

So we’ve now switched over to Pivotal full time to handle our team’s task backlog & we’ll be using it in future to manage milestone & release test phases.   I’d recommend giving it a try, thanks again to Rob Lambert for suggesting it.

So that’s it a short and sweet tip for task management, thanks for reading.

This quick tip comes from a webinar I recently watched called “An Introduction to Lean Test Management”. I took a couple of notes from this, one of these being pick charts, something I’d never heard of surprisingly until then. As our team had an issue with task management in that we had no formal method for this I thought it would be interesting to mock up a quick example in a spreadsheet for how we could potentially use this.

You can have a look at this example here, notice it’s slightly modified from the standard format in that I removed the words “Possible, Implement, Challenge and Kill”. I personally felt these weren’t needed & could potentially confuse a simple example.

So you get the general idea of these, we want to map out our tasks in a format that allows someone to come along and pick easily a task. Knowing how much time they have they will be able to pick something of high value within their time constraints.

You could improve the example by adding in some clever macro’s to automate the chart aspect or write some php scripts to improve it and make it available via a website for your team. Either way I like them since their simple and easy to use.

Alternatively you could use the popular RTM, something which we are trailing out just now.

If you have another suggestion let me know we’re open to idea’s.