hesco has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Has anyone ever built and released an online implementation of the "story card", advocated by Extreme Perl in Chapter 4, at: http://www.extremeperl.org/bk/release-planning which can be used by developers and clients who work together by phone, fax, email and web, but don't know what one another actually look like?

I get that handling 3x5 cards helps people think together. But that sort of breaks down when you have to overnight the cards between cities.

If such an animal does not already exist, would anyone care to collaborate on building one? Either way, I'd love to not have to do that myself.

-- Hugh

  • Comment on Seeking Extreme Perl "Story Card" application

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Re: Seeking Extreme Perl "Story Card" application
by adrianh (Chancellor) on Apr 06, 2006 at 08:54 UTC
    Has anyone ever built and released an online implementation of the "story card", advocated by Extreme Perl in Chapter 4, at: http://www.extremeperl.org/bk/release-planning which can be used by developers and clients who work together by phone, fax, email and web, but don't know what one another actually look like?

    If I'm forced to have a distributed team and can't have everybody using cards locally then I just use a wiki with one-page-per-story. Kwiki does the job quite nicely.

    If you want more sophisticated stuff take a look at tools like Xplanner. There's a list on http://xprogramming.com/software.htm.

[reply]
      I work for a global company where distributed teams are the norm rather than the exception, and the groups which use 'agile' development practices also tend to use wikis for this purpose. They are already using them for documenting things and sharing information anyway, so it's a natural extension to use them for capturing stories as well.
[reply]

      My current team at work was using XPlanner for a while...but we didn't like it too much. We've since gone back to index cards (since the majority of us aren't distributed; for the rest we just let our manager move the cards around).

      One thing you might want to look at, though, is webnote. It's Python, not Perl, but it's so cool, who cares? :-) Actually, most of the cool stuff is JavaScript; the server-side stuff seems pretty simple, and if you've got your heart set on Perl, it shouldn't be too hard to port.

      Finally, I agree with the other posters that a wiki would be a good choice. And my favorite? The one I wrote, of course - sk - a (very) simple wiki.

      ...every application I have ever worked on is a glorified munger...

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Re: Seeking Extreme Perl "Story Card" application
by xdg (Monsignor) on Apr 06, 2006 at 13:43 UTC

    If you want/need something more structured than a wiki, you might look into some of the tools by 37signals (even if it is Ruby on Rails and not Perl).

    -xdg

    Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

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Re: Seeking Extreme Perl "Story Card" application
by zentara (Cardinal) on Apr 06, 2006 at 12:58 UTC
    All you really need to do is setup a cgi fileupload script and let people upload a mini-webpage for themselves. You could setup a directory heirarchy like: 
    Projects
     MyCoolProject
            Who_is_Who
                    Bill_G
                    Bob_B
                           index.html
                           bob_b.jpg

    [download]
    Now setup a cgi script, to accept an upload from those developers, and a Form to enter their personal data. Then convert the form data to "index.html" , with a link to their uploaded image, and drop it into the appropriate sub dir.

    The only thing you have to think about, is "are they being honest?" . Is that really their photo?

    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
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[d/l]
Re: Seeking Extreme Perl "Story Card" application
by ambrus (Abbot) on Apr 06, 2006 at 16:22 UTC

    I don't know about such an online implementation, but we use an online bug tracking system for a project.

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Re: Seeking Extreme Perl "Story Card" application
by hesco (Deacon) on Apr 07, 2006 at 02:52 UTC
    XPlanner certainly looks interesting, as does the hosted service from basecamphq.com/. But my preference would be to host something in house and to do it in perl, without having to learn to administer Java, whatever that is. Anyone know of some perl tools for this purpose?

    -- Hugh

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Re: Seeking Extreme Perl "Story Card" application
by toomasp (Initiate) on Apr 07, 2006 at 09:19 UTC
    Trac with it's tickets might fit your profile.. check it out @ http://www.edgewall.com/trac/
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Re: Seeking Extreme Perl "Story Card" application
by hesco (Deacon) on Apr 12, 2006 at 04:38 UTC
    I checked out XPlanner, but wasn't ready to mount that jree / tomcat learning curve. But XPlanner had a links page with some additional hints. I installed XPWeb instead. It seems to all be javascript driven, but has proven useful on this small project we're working on. I'm still figuring out how to use it, but it certainly looks promising. I installed one perl driven tool for this purpose. (I don't remember its name). But it didn't look like something I would want to put before a client. In fact, one of my partners is advocating that we not involve our clients in dealing with this application, but only with the reports we pull off its database backend. I'm still willing to explore other possibilities, but am pleased with what I've seen so far. Thanks folks for the leads. -- Hugh
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