Agile Drupal Development using Rally
Fri, Jul 17, 2009 by Arnold
While working on the Drupal based sports social networking web site Juump (www.juump.com), we used a tool called Rally to manage the Agile development process. Rally comes in 2 versions: community and enterprise. Rally is a combined project management, team management, time management and bug tracking tool.
At the initial stages of the development process, stories are created to describe the functional requirements of the site. For example, a story will describe the ability of a user to search for a tennis court using the search bar. A story will have information about the estimated hours for development, its priority and the developer who will be working on the user story. It is similar to a use cases. Stories are organized into iterations based on their priorities. The more important functionalities are placed into the earlier iterations. As the development progressed, priorities for user stories are modified. After each iteration, the actual hours for each user story is entered onto the system. This allows for comparison between the actual hours and the estimate hours.
On top of the project management functions, Rally also provides a bug tracking tool. There is a defects management tab on the system. Using the defects management functions, users can add defects associated with the user stories. Similar to the user stories, the defects can be organized into iterations. This allows for their prioritization during the bug fixing process. Defects can be re-opened with comments tied to them as regression testing happens.
The most powerful features of Rally, however lies in it graphing abilities. Charts and graphs can be created to easily visualize the rate of the bug fixes and other key development progress indicators.
We have found Rally to be a great tool for features organization and bug tracking. Rally also integrates with various other tools such as Eclipse and JIRA.
quibids posted on July 9, 2010 3:06 am
I've been trying to figure out this Drupal system for about a month now. It's totally confusing, and completely not user friendly. The need to have icons that are a bit more obvious than what they are. I'm not totally giving up on this yet, but if it doesn't work out soon. I will.
Dave Morris posted on July 19, 2009 5:37 am
I agree. I use Rally on a project right now, and before I figured out the problem with having the site open in multiple tabs and editing stories and tasks, I lost a lot of tedious data entry time because the edits would randomly disappear or be assigned to the wrong task. If they revamped rally to use permalinks for everything (even with the # string in the url like facebook does now), it would make a huge difference in usability.
Overall, though, I haven't seen another product that can do as much as Rally in terms of features and integration points, so it's still a great tool,
Dave Morris
kathleen posted on July 19, 2009 2:08 am
I've used Rally, and I wanted to love it desperately. Unfortunately... I can not work with it whatsoever. The tools themselves are great and incredible, but the implementation was done incredibly poorly.
Rally does not allow multitasking. You cannot open more than one page at a time because it messes with your session. This is a crushing blow to the usability of Rally.
As a bug tester, I have many in-progress bug reports open as I write down my test results, then open another one because I found another bug when testing the former. I can easily get up to 5 or more in-progress bug reports.
As a developer, I will open up several issues as my "to do" list for the day. I will also frequently need to check back on other issues, or realize I fixed an issue... or simply found another bug and need to post another issue.
Everything you do in Rally must be done within a single browser pane, forcing you to continuously navigate around to get anywhere and back. Its hell to anyone with tabitis.
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