Agile Toolkit Plugin - Planning Poker and Simple Taskboard

This page describes the new Agile Toolkit Plugin, which is being upgraded to include a simple taskboard

Name Agile Toolkit Plugin Version 1.3 Product Versions 2.9.1 Author(s) John Martin, Nate Oster Homepage Here Price free License BSD JavaDocs TBD IssueTracking n/a Download JAR Here Source Here

Date 2009-Jan 2009-Feb 2009-Mar 2009-Apr 2009-May 2009-Jun 2009-Jul Hits 37 77 82 68 88 78 6

Description/Features

The agile toolkit contains a set of plugins that support agile techniques like Planning Poker and Taskboards. It will continue to expand as demand dictates.

Planning Poker

Planning Poker (tm) is a trademark of Mountain Goat Software. The term is used by permission of Mike Cohn.

Simple Task Board

A taskboard is a structure for displaying tasks so that they are arranged physically by state and by priority. This simple taskboard allows you to drag tasks up and down in priority and left and right to change state. It is a "simple" taskboard because it does not tie the tasks back to user stories; however, several taskboards can coexist on the same page.

Installation

This is available through the Plugin Repository:

• Installing plugins overview

Usage

Planning Poker Macro

Planning poker is a technique to help teams estimate. Each card has a face value. Each player in the game chooses one of the cards from his/her hand based on how big he or she thinks the whole task is (not just his/her part) and puts it down on the table. When ready, all the cards are revealed and the team discusses the results.

The game is interesting when the estimates are highly divergent. Diverse estimates are an indicator that the team doesn't understand the requirement in the same way, so this is an opportunity to discuss/ask questions/delve into the requirement. Then, try another round and see if the estimates start converging.

The number on the card should not represent any unit of time or cost. These estimates are purposely about size relative to other requirements in the project. We discourage the use of time-based terms like "hours", "days", "seasons of Firefly."

There are three roles for the participants and three states for the game. If the game is not closed, a viewer of the page will be shown a link to join the game. At this point, the poker table is set up and the user is and observer. Since observers do not participate in the estimation process (they are not committed), they are called chickens. A chicken can select the link to become a player (we could call this a pig, I guess). Players are dealt a hand with a selection of estimate cards. While the dealer has the game open for playing, each player will select a card that represents a relative size of the effort in his/her opinion. All players can see when the other players have chosen cards, but not the value of the cards. The dealer can choose to reveal all of the cards at once, at which point, players cannot choose a new card. This is the flop state. After discussion, the dealer can deal again (which puts the game back into the open state) or record a consensus estimate in the page (which puts the game in the closed state).

When a game is closed, only the dealer is provided with a join the game link so that he or she can join the game and choose to re-deal, which pust the game in the open state.

An advantage of using the wiki for the Planning Poker game is that you can gather and evolve your requirements (tasks, whatever) using the wiki format in whatever form you desire. The wiki allows for collaboration during the requirement creation and allows for easy editing, version tracking, and commenting. All of this can be done ahead of the game to help refine the item under estimation. In addition, the estimation exercise can be performed in sync or over a period of time. The underlying mechanism of not revealing the card choices until the dealer calls for it helps to ensure the independence of the estimation process either way. Of course, nothing replaces that conversation that happens when are one or two outlying estimates in a game, though there is the comment stream.

Planning Poker Summary Macro

If you arrange the pages that you want to conduct sizing exercises for as a tree under one page, you can put the Planning Poker Summary macro on that parent page. It will provide a summary of the status of all the games placed on children (and further descendant) pages under the summary page.

Simple Task Board Macro

The Simple Task Board Macro allows users to interact with a set of tasks. This is a "simple" task board because it does not tie the tasks back to a user story.

• Tasks can be added and modified (click on the magnifying glass and the text shows up on a larger card for editing)
• Push the Shuffle button to allow tasks to be dragged and dropped
  • Tasks can be dragged left and right to move from one state to another (push the shuffle button to allow movement)
  • Tasks can be dragged up and down in the list to indicate priority
  • Tasks can be removed (they drop off the screen if you pull them out of a column and let go)
• Tasks track short description (headline), owner, estimate
• Tasks are saved to the page as a wiki table, with each row indicating one task.
• Changes to task contents are saved when the "Save Me" button on the big task card is pushed.
• Changes to task location/state are saved when the "Save" button on the left is pushed. This way, tasks can be arranged and rearranged several times before saving.
• Changes to the tasks affect the page's revision history and notify watchers by email
• Owner picture (for user names that are Confluence user names) show in upper left corner of each task
  • An empty chair indicates that no owner has been added
  • The tooltip for the owner picture gives the owner ID that was entered on the card.
  • Owners are also shown in the left column. Click an owner to highlight his/her cards
• Click the life preserver for a little bit of help
• Some fields are shown with drop-downs in addition to the text entry to make it easier when using electronic whiteboards for the taskboard. The only owners shown in the drop-down are ones that already have tasks. You do not have to use the drop-downs.

Examples

Planning Poker

The Planning Poker macro has one required parameter: dealer

{planning-poker:dealer=taleswapper}
or
{planning-poker:taleswapper}

The dealer controls the state of the game, determining when player card choices are visible to others and saving the result of the game.

Planning Poker Summary

The Planning Poker summary macro has no parameters:

{planning-poker-summary}

It reports on the state of each game on a descendant page under the current one. If a game has recorded an estimate, the estimate and the players involved in contributing to that estimate are also displayed.

Do not embed this in the same page as a Planning Poker game. It will only report on the games of its children and further descendants.

Simple Task Board

The Simple Task Board macro has one required parameter, title. The title (or id) of the task board is the first entry after the colon:

{simpletaskboard:Sprint 17}

The macro also has an optional parameter: states. The default states (or columns) are To Do, In Process, Done. You can change the state columns to have as many as you want (although the macro doesn't care how big your screen is, so you might not want 100 states:

{simpletaskboard:Sprint 17|states=Could Do,Will Do,Are Doing,Done Did}

Version History

This has been tested with Firefox 3.0.3 and Internet Explorer 7. The taskboard macro's dragging will not work with IE 6

Version	Date	Comment
0.6	30 April 2008	First release for the contest. Open to comments!
0.7	04 May 2008	Updated macro names, modified db storage, and added page links to games at summary macro. If You Have Games Created With 0.6 Data from games created with 0.6 should automatically transfer into 0.7 format; however, you will have to add the dashes to the macro names on each page. Old games will not show up on the summary page until the names have been changed.
0.8	09 May 2008	Saves to page as table when the estimate is saved, so the version of the page is updated and notifications can occur.
1.0	23 October 2008	Adds the new and exciting simple task board macro
1.1	7 November 2008	Fixes for IE 7, show estimates and owner pics, and clean up display of task add/change form
1.2	3 December 2008	Primarily to begin refactoring to use jQuery, also add team member display on left (and task highlighting), and add drop-downs for some fields
1.3	5 February 2009	Really simple graph and progress bar (using Raphael!), shrink the cards in display, fix highlighting for unassigned tasks (IE), and attempt workaround for XStream no arg problem on AIX
1.4	5 May 2009	Introduces a new field for details. This is a multiline field that accepts limited wiki markup (bold, italic, underline, external links and very simple lists). The headline field now also accepts external links (but no other markup). Both fields display differently on the edit card. Click on the field to change it into a form field for text modification. Release Candidate I'm not finding an easy way to automate testing the GUI aspects of this, so I'm releasing it as a candidate for your input. If you want to stick with stable, stay with 1.3. Otherwise, I'd love some feedback on this one.

Screenshots

Screenshots
The chart trolls through the history of the page to find days on which the taskboard changed.	The tasks can be collapsed to one line.	A taskboard is a physical representation of a state machine with columns for states
Click the pack of cards to allow dragging from one column to another (and within the column) click pack again to save	Clicking on the Add button or on the Magnifying Glass brings up a task card for editing.	You can have multiple taskboards on one page. Shuffling is unique to each board. Use states to configure the column names (and how many)
Click on the user picture to the left to highlight tasks. Click on the group image to unhighlight.	Players can choose cards while the game is "open". Players do not see other players' cards until after the dealer reveals them all.	The dealer controls the game and can also be a player.
The summary macro displays the descendent pages that had games and their results.	On loading the page, the last estimate is shown.	Observers (chickens) can watch but not participate
On the flop, the cards are revealed to everybody at once.	The dealer can save the estimate and close the game. No further play is allowed on this game until the dealer chooses new deal.	The dealer's menu changes as the game progresses.
The player's menu changes as the game progresses.	The dealer has several special powers.