Mingle, the accelerator for agile team collaboration

Mingle, the accelerator for agile team collaboration

Reprinted by the author:
By: 88250
Blog: http:/blog.csdn.net/dl88250
MSN & Gmail & QQ: DL88250@gmail.com

1. What is mingle?
Mingle isAgile Project Management and team collaboration toolsIt provides a shared workspace for the team. It supports a variety of Agile Methods with built-in project templates for XP, scrum, and agile hybrid. Mingle is also the result of thoughtworks's agile practices over the past seven years. In the English dictionary, the word "mingle" means "merge into one, mix. Indeed, it brings together the whole and strives for the purpose of a common project.

In mingle, everything isCard! Card
Film) is a very important concept, which is a basic concept in many agile methodologies (typical, XP. In fact, this is also true in our daily lives. For example
To use the meeting room, she will fill out a meeting room application form, fill out the form, and submit it to the leand, Daniel of the project. Daniel saw the time and attended the meeting.
Personnel and other personnel agreed to the Meeting application. After he signed "agree", the table was submitted to lead, Yu of the company's Resource Group.
Zhao. After reading the application, he arranged the hardware usage in the conference room According to the application form. At this point, the vaness meeting room application is passed. If you use mingle to describe this process, the application form
Is a card, and the entire application process (signing and submission) is the process of switching the card status. Along with this process, all the participants are responsible for the task and the task is finally solved.

Of course, the above is a very simple example. What mingle can do is not simply a simple task of "applying for a meeting room. Next, let's get started!

2. What does mingle bring to us?
1. team collaboration-shared workspace of the team
One team, one tool
With mingle, the "distance" between developers, testers, business analysts, and project managers in the team will be greatly shortened. Everyone is working in a unified project workspace, which allows information to be shared in a timely manner. You can see what the output of the current stage and history of the project is.

"Paste" inCard WallCards on the card wall can tell us a lot of information: who is doing what, who has done what, what is waiting for the start of WHO, and so on. To change the status of a card (for example, from "in progress" to "complete"), you only need to change the status of the card in the pool.DragClick a card!

Project documentation!
I have been discussing the significance of documents in agile projects. I have always believed in the first law of Martin documents (Martin's first law of documentation: Produce
No document unless its need is immediate and
Significant ). In the project documentation, mingle is designed to adhere to this point. In mingle, project-related documents can be recorded using Wiki. Project
Requirement development and important project information (scope, schedule,
Etc.) You can use a wiki record to present complex documents and trace the history of documents. Why not?

RSS & email reminders
When a team member changes project-related information, mingle can send this message to others so that others can quickly know the change. For example, when the status of a story card changes to "Devlopment complete", testers in the team will be notified.

2. Project Management-Simplified Software Delivery
Custom project attributes and templates
Mingle can customize any information you want to control for cards, so that different projects have different main concerns, so you can focus on the corresponding concerns. This is the agile approach. In a project, if tools are available to support, capture, and visualize team activities, you can keep track of the project status and make real-time decisions during the project. This greatly reduces the delivery risks of agile projects. The project template can be easily exported and imported, allowing you to continue to the next project on the basis of the success of the current project.

Workflow!
Workflow is a very important concept. In any project, any task requires a process to control. Mingle allows us to customize workflows suitable for our own projects. The custom interface is also very friendly. For example, you can describe the processing process of a sotry as follows:

Card tree!
This is a new feature added in Mingle 2.0. Using the card tree, you can manage tasks in a project hierarchically. All operations can be performed directly from the interface.DragOf!

You can establish parent-child relationships between various types of cards. These relationships form a tree structure. In one aspect, this shows the complexity of the project and the decomposition of the project objectives.
In a team, different roles are responsible for different tasks and fulfill different responsibilities. Therefore, in a project, different roles need to view their tasks in a hierarchical and intuitive manner from different perspectives.
For example, in a project:

• The Project Manager may want to have a plan tree for WBS (work breakdown structure)
• Business Analyst wants to use story
  Tree Splits a feature into a set of different and related functions.
• Designers want to use a tree structure to break down high-level logic and uidesign of the project.
• The tester (testers) wants to break down the test scenario into more precise test cases.

This
The development team can examine the development process of the entire project from a higher perspective, and go deep into various details as needed. In addition, the defined card tree can be at any tree level based on the inheritance relationships you designed.
To generate metric data. For example, you may estimate each story. If a feature is composed of multiple story and one story is composed of multiple tasks
The size of the story can be automatically calculated according to the task, and the amount of work that the feature needs to do is clear at a glance.

Powerful Project Report
In a project, you can use mql (mingle Query Language) to generate reports for any project attributes you have defined. This helps us to view the progress and history of the project from various perspectives, and mql is very easy to learn and use. In mingle 2.0, you can also generate reports across projects, which is important for multi-project management.

Integration with other systems
Mingle can be easily integrated with other systems, such as CAS (Central Authentication Service, Central Identity Authentication Service), LDAP Identity Authentication Service, subversion/perforce source code control, rest APIs, continuous integration with cruise. With these support, mingle can be seamlessly integrated with your existing system to work together to achieve the project goal.

3. Do your team need mingle?
After reading the above features, I believe you have a general understanding of mingle. However, you need to be cautious when selecting a tool that may have a great impact on the team. The following lists some important notes. When you want to select mingle:
Hard requirement:

• Mingle isBusinessSoftware,OneOne user license is $318.6 for six months, $566.4 for one year, and $995 for life.
• MingleHardware configurationRequirement RatioRelatively high. It is the first commercial software built on jruby, and jruby consumes a lot of resources on the system (hopefully JDK will improve the performance of jruby in the future ), however, earlier versions of mingle require at least 2 GB RAM
• Currently, mingle only supportsThree TypesDatabases: MySQL 5.0, PostgreSQL 8.1, and ipvs 8.2. Note that the previous mingle version (2.0.1) does not support ipvs 8.3

"Soft" requirement:
The process for your team isAgile Process? Although mingle should be able to support teams in non-agile processes, mingle is tailored for agile processes. Therefore, if your team process is not agile, you 'd better use it with caution.
Your agile teamTrueNeed it? Agile Methods tell us that tools are not the most important part of the team process, and talents are the core. If your team is already implementing agility well, consider the "agility and Tools" issue before choosing mingle.

Of course, here we only describe some of the main considerations for choosing mingle. After clarifying the above issues, you can select mingle for your team.

4. Is mingle easy to use?
Mingle can be installed in two ways:

• Installation Package

Download and follow the installation instructions to install mingle. The entire installation process is completed on the web interface. you can install mingle conveniently and quickly according to the installation wizard.

• Use livecd

People who have used Linux should know livecd, which is provided by many Linux systems. The livecd of mingle is made based on Ubuntu 7.10. You can use this livecd to experience/install mingle
In addition, if you want to experience mingle as quickly as possible, you can go to the official website to provide the drive online function, address: http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle/testdrive

I believe you have a clear understanding of the use and specific configuration of mingle after reading this article, so I will not go into details here. If your team is an agile team and your team really needs such a project management and collaboration tool, mingle is the first choice!