Monday, February 04, 2008

Combining Trac and XPlanner

I wrote sometime ago about how using issue/bug tracker (Trac) and progress tracker (XPlanner) is really helpful, at least in my case. It will be really good if those two really integrated, but unfortunately it's not the case right now. We need to "integrate" them manually.

Here's the main conceptual merging I have made between them to support the concepts I am using :

Tickets is Story, Story is Ticket

From here on it's like directing the flow of detail that is stuck in Ticket in Trac, connect it and let it trickle down in to more detail through Story "hole" in XPlanner. Every Story is a Ticket being done.

We could have best of both worlds with this connection. On the trac side we have more strategic view of the Ticket/Story (Milestone, Roadmap, Wikis) and on the XPlanner side we have Progrress/Development detail regarding it (Burndown chart, tasks drilldown, assignments, timesheet).

Some useful mechanism regarding this :

  • Make a wiki shortcut in XPlanner to Trac so in xplanner you could type something like 'wiki:ticket/555' or 'wiki:changeset/555' XPlanner and it's wiki system will link it to the Trac's entry. We could do interesting with this like make notes in Task entry that link to certain subversion revision.
  • Use 1 to n mapping from Trac's Milsestone to XPlanner's iteration. Pick story to be done in certain iteration from it's parent Milestone.
  • Let all the detail concerning the Ticket (notes, references, updates, troubles) updated in Trac to avoid duplication or confusion. Position XPlanner more for scheduling, timesheet and log-like notes.
Trac and XPlanner has a very potential synergy which I think is worth exploring. It seems, by design, both are made to be complemented by the other or something else similar in nature.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds interesting.

Could you please elaborate a bit more how you actually do the planning? I.e. I'm not completely sure what you mean when you say "Use 1 to n mapping from Trac's Milsestone to XPlanner's iteration. Pick story to be done in certain iteration from it's parent Milestone.".

Do you store the estimates in XPlanner or in Trac?

Hafiz said...

Hi Dirk,
For 1 to N mapping, here's an example :
Milestone 1.3, tickets : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Iteration 1.3a, stories : 1, 2, 3
Iteration 1.3b, stories : 4, 5

Estimates are done in XPlanner since it's built-in there and integrated with everything else in it, e.g: charts, accuracy.