Extreme Planner: Practice what you preach?

[Gregg Bolinger]

At some point in time, when EP first became usable, did you begin to use the tool for future development of EP? If so, did this allow you to fine tune it and find features to add/remove along the way?

How influencial has using EP been on developing EP?

[Dave Churchville]

Originally posted by Gregg Bolinger:
At some point in time, when EP first became usable, did you begin to use the tool for future development of EP? If so, did this allow you to fine tune it and find features to add/remove along the way?

How influencial has using EP been on developing EP?

Hi Gregg,

Thanks for the great question.

Actually the initial reason we developed EP was that we were frustrated with the available tools for planning and tracking development.

We were the first users, and continue to use EP for internal planning and tracking of it's own development, and that of other projects.

For example, one the things we noticed was that when working with outside customers, they occasionally wanted a hard copy or spreadsheet of the current stories being worked on. Features like the export to Excel, and to Word/RTF came from these types of interactions.

The Iteration Status view feature was another one that sort of emerged as we were looking for a simple way internally to see what was happening at a glance for the entire iteration. This view lets you see each story scheduled for the iteration, and for each one, which tasks are completed, in progress, or not yet started, and also the current status of acceptance tests.

In terms of influence, I think we sort of realized that showing restraint on adding features was probably the smartest thing we could do, both with EP and on other development projects. Too many products suffer from feature bloat and become difficult to use and to support.

We are pretty selective in terms of trying to add high value features that don't add unnecessary complexity.

[Gregg Bolinger]

Thanks. What was the decisive factor in making this tool web based? I know you mentioned you have wrapped up an eclipse plugin but are there any plans for a desktop client in the future?

[vishwanath nadimpally]

Hi Dave,

I just took a 1 minute tour of ExtremePlanner and my first impression was 'Mercury ITG'. I used to work at Mercury interactive where we built this custom project management tool called ITG, which works with Kintana. What are the advantages of ExtremePlanner over other such products.

[Dave Churchville]

Originally posted by Gregg Bolinger:
Thanks. What was the decisive factor in making this tool web based? I know you mentioned you have wrapped up an eclipse plugin but are there any plans for a desktop client in the future?

Well, in our experience, the kinds of teams that get the most out of project planning software are often distributed at multiple locations. So this required either a client-server architecture, or a web-based one.

We thought that a Web-based approach would make it easy for anyone to access or update the information from anywhere without installing special software.

The Eclipse plugin is really just a simple way to let developers see what tasks they've got, and to be able to quickly update them without leaving the IDE. Since developers are the ones who need to frequently update tasks, having an integrated solution is pretty high value.

We aren't currently planning a desktop client, although there will soon be enough exposed APIs for some enterprising soul to create one for themsleves ;-)

[Dave Churchville]

Originally posted by vishwanath nadimpally:
Hi Dave,

I just took a 1 minute tour of ExtremePlanner and my first impression was 'Mercury ITG'. I used to work at Mercury interactive where we built this custom project management tool called ITG, which works with Kintana. What are the advantages of ExtremePlanner over other such products.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with Mercury ITG, so I can't really tell you how ExtremePlanner compares.

In general, it's designed to be lightweight, and just handle the basic workflow of defining user stories, scheduling them into releases and iterations, dividing them into tasks and acceptance tests, and doing some basic tracking and reporting.