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Welcome to the Storytracker Project

We built this tool for how we work.

Storytracker is an open source agile project management tool, built using Ruby on Rails.

You can see Storytracker at work, managing the stories for FolkLogic's open source projects, at http://storytracker.folklogic.net/projects. We also have an open site where you can play as much as you want at http://storytracker.folklogic.net/sandbox.

David Anderson, one of the founders of FolkLogic, started work on Storytracker when he and Larry Baltz worked together at Quiconnect. It grew out of a need for an on-line reflection of the eXtreme Programming (XP) story cards we were using to manage several development projects. We needed the info on-line because our marketing department was in London and our development team was in Grenoble. We had to have a way to swap stories back and forth and talk about the state of things over the phone and by email.

Storytracker manages XP stories using a web interface and allows you to track their development state and plan when stories will be worked on. Since one of the main drivers for making this tool in the first place was communication between our marketing (internal customer) and development teams, Storytracker emphasizes the stories' role in the planning process.

Main Features

Story browser, with edit-in-place interface. Sort stories by iteration, project, priority, etc. See at a glance recently completed stories, ongoing work, and future plans. Update story data. Try it now.
Project planning -- drag-and-drop the stories within each project to establish their relative priorities. Try it now.
Milestone and release planning -- move stories between iterations, or milestones, or drop them from the plan altogether -- using drag-and-drop. Try it now.
Print story cards. (/stories/print -- have your browser print this page 4-up, landscape)
Statistics -- storytracker will calculate velocities to help give you an idea of how accurate your estimates are. (/projects, /iterations)

How We Use Storytracker

Quiconnect been using Storytracker for about two years, with a database that now has about 1000 stories.
New stories are written as a normal part of doing business. They are written by the marketing group, the operations team, developers, and managers.
Developers estimate the work needed to complete new stories.
Every week we have a conference call between marketing, operations, and engineering to review status, discuss new stories, and plan. This prompted us to implement the edit-in-place and drag-and-drop interfaces so we could made modifications in real-time during conference calls and other meetings.
Every couple of months we get together to re-assess the longer term roadmap for development. This usually done face to face with marketing, development, operations and, if possible, sales. In this meeting we generally review the stories, write missing stories, and rank the stories within each project.
We generally prefer to use physical index cards for stories whenever we have face-to-face planning meetings -- and we use Storytracker to print out the cards. As a lot of people in the XP community have noted, physical cards are easy to arrange and rearrange to facilitate looking at their relationships in different ways. So, Storytracker is not intended as a replacement for story cards, but helps with projects where people in diverse locations need to know the state of the projects and need to communicate with each other about story planning and execution.
As developers work on a story -- either estimating or implementing it -- they add comments about open questions, the implementation, potential issues, etc.
Project leaders and developers keep the info in storytracker up-to-date as stories get worked on.

Requirements

Ruby (see http://www.ruby-lang.org/)
Rails (see http://www.rubyonrails.org/)
Ruby Gems (http://docs.rubygems.org/)
Database and ruby driver (MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite)
RedCloth gem (http://www.whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/redcloth/)

Getting started

svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/storytracker/trunk storytracker
set up config/database.yml
rake db:migrate
script/server
browse to localhost:3000

rubyforge project homepage

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