Pivoting Around

As part of Orbital’s development we need to keep what we’re doing on track, and ensure that what is produced is actually what people are after. We’re building the project using agile development methods, which mean that instead of generating a load of documentation and exacting requirements up front and then building software, we generate a basic set of requirements, start developing and then return to look at new or changed requirements at regular intervals.

Keeping tabs on this kind of thing requires a management tool, and in our case we’re using the wonderful Pivotal Tracker, and here’s why.

Pivotal allows us to break down user requirements (gathered through a variety of means, including meetings, surveys, observation and so-on) into discreet bundles called ‘stories’, each of which represents something that a user needs (or wants) to be able to do with the final product. An example may be “project administrators must be able to assign roles to project users”, or “users must be able to manually add a data point”. By creating these stories it starts to become clearer what actually needs to be done.

From there we can start to fully analyse each of these stories, providing them with information such as a ‘score’ of how difficult to achieve each story will be, or including sub-tasks for actual development purposes. Stories can be assigned to various people based on who needs to be involved, and go through a clearly defined workflow of being started, being finished, being delivered in a product version and being approved by the customer.

On top of this management of user stories we can also pack out Pivotal with higher-level package deliverables and deadlines, along with bug reporting and general project chores. Once we’ve got all these things into the Tracker we’re able to re-order them as priorities shift, giving us an instant overview of what’s happening in the current iteration (a 2-week long development cycle) as well as what’s going to be happening in future iterations. At this point, Pivotal Tracker comes into its own with something called ’emergent planning’.

Emergent planning takes a look at how we’re actually performing in terms of crunching through our list of user stories and dynamically adjusts which stories we’re going to be tackling in upcoming iterations. If we’re doing well we begin to see more points worth of development per iteration, and if we’re slipping then Tracker gives us fewer. Since we’ve told Pivotal what needs to happen before certain deadlines are met (when we ordered stories and tasks), and since Pivotal knows roughly how fast we’re working, it’s easy to see if we’re predicted to hit or miss development milestones.

Want to see what we’re up to? Our Pivotal Tracker project is open for you all to see.