project management

As I’ve said before, we use Thoughtworks Studio Mingle to track our backlogs.

One thing Mingle has not provided for us in the time we’ve worked with it is a daily burn up. Kind of shocking.

Last month, we migrated our instance to the EC2 cloud. I took advantage of that migration to un-cruft our Mingle instance, apply the XP template and simplify card types and states.

Now time to stop dumping data out of mingle to report status. Yes. Kind of shocking.

The first step was to track the data points we need for a burn up.

That involved creating a series of date fields to track the day on which a story moves from in analysis to ready for dev, in dev, in qa, ready for customer (QA done) and customer accepted.

We also need a way to have those dates recorded automatically as part of moving cards from one state to another.

So we set up Mingle card transitions.

This replaces the drag and drop behavior of a card from one swim lane to another with a button link on the card. This a bummer for our product team but it allows us to script transitions to both change the status and set the appropriate date field.

Now to setup a burn up chart using Mingle charts and mql.

{% dashboard-panel %}
{% panel-heading %}Current iteration burnup{% panel-heading %}
{% panel-content %}
{{ 
    data-series-chart  
    conditions: (‘Type’ = ‘Story’ OR ‘Type’ = ‘Defect’ OR ‘Type’ = ‘Task’) AND ‘Iteration – Scheduled’ = (Current Iteration)  AND ‘Status’ > ‘In Analysis’  AND ‘Status’ is not ‘Deleted’  AND ‘Status’ is not ‘Blocked’ AND ‘Estimate’ IS NOT NULL AND ‘Iteration – Analysis Completed’ IS NOT NULL
    labels: SELECT DISTINCT ‘Date Estimated’
    x-title: Date
    x-labels-start: 2010-08-10
    x-labels-end: 2010-08-21
    y-title: Estimated Scope in Story Points
    show-start-label: false
    data-point-symbol: diamond
    data-labels: true
    chart-height: 500
    chart-width: 800
    plot-height: 375
    plot-width: 500
    trend-ignore: zeroes-at-end-and-last-value 
    cumulative: true
    series: 
    – label: Total Scope
      color: black
      data: SELECT ‘Date Estimated’, SUM(‘Estimate’)
    – label: Development Complete
      color: yellow
      line-width: 1
      data: SELECT ‘Date Dev Complete’, SUM(‘Estimate’) WHERE ‘Status’ >= ‘Development Complete’
    – label: QA Complete
      color: orange
      line-width: 1
      data: SELECT ‘Date QA Complete’, SUM(‘Estimate’) WHERE ‘Status’ >= ‘QA Complete’
    – label: Accepted
      color: blue
      data: SELECT ‘Date Accepted’, SUM(‘Estimate’) WHERE ‘Status’ >= ‘Accepted’
}}
{% panel-content %}
{% dashboard-panel %}
{% dashboard-panel %}

Observations:

I had to hard code date start and date end in x-labels-start and x-labels-end but otherwise, I was able to use the project variable ‘Iteration – Scheduled’ = (Current Iteration) that’s part of the XP Template.
Burn up is accomplished by setting cumulative:true. Unfortunately, I can’t get trend lines to work as a result.

Here’s what the result looks like: