I have finished the first version of Taskboardy, a wave gadget that allows to maintain a taskboard inside a wave. The gadget could be useful for agile distributed teams using Scrum or XP.
The idea is create a wave at the start of the sprint, install the gadget and add all members of the team. Then, user stories and tasks for each user story can be created and the tasks can be moved among the different states. Participants in the wave can assign the tasks to themselves. When someone modifies the taskboard, the rest of the team can see it immediately. Wave advices of the modification showing a number on the wave and bringing the wave to the first position.
The taskboard is very basic. I thought about adding some other features, like a description for the user story or the story point estimates, but didn't because I wanted to keep the first version light.
The taskboard looks like this:
If you want to take a look now and have an account in the wave sandbox, click here.
At a technical level, the gadget is made using javascript that calls the wave api to store the state of the taskboard in the wave. The platform takes care of broadcasting this state change to all other participants. For the drag & drop functionality, I used the Google JQuery API.
To install the gadget, just select "Add gadget by URL"
And then point to http://taskboardy.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/taskboard.xml or the short url http://bit.ly/4lc6lT. The installation is really easy!!
Another 'feature' that comes out of the box because it's inserted into a wave is the possibility of replaying the whole sprint. Not sure if this could be useful, but it sure looks cool.
Of course it's free to use and open source. I haven't been able to do thorough testing, so if you find a bug please let me know and I will fix it. I don't plan to do any addition of functionality. One of the reasons is that if some people start using it, I would be changing their functionality.
Please share your comments!
Update: I was not clear on the difference between the sandbox and the preview. The gadget works on both. The only difference is in the sandbox, there is a wave already created with the gadget installed. In the preview, you will have to install it.
Update 2/7 (superbowl hour): Fixed a problem with especial characters (",', etc.)
Update 2/7 (superbowl hour): Fixed a problem with especial characters (",', etc.)
Can't seem to move the cards in either Chrome 4 or Fx3.5. :-(
ReplyDeleteThis is cool, I was just wondering how Wave could be put to practicle use. I can see myself using this a lot. Thanks, John
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ReplyDeleteLove it. A great example of something we'd use in wave. I'd like to customize it - are you looking for collaborators? Post a comment here - I'll check back.
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ReplyDeleteHi Steve. Thanks a lot! I wasn't planning to add new functionality myself on this gadget, but if have ideas, send them to fzuppa@gmail.com and I will create you an account on the svn. Anyway, I 'd like to keep this one simple. I thought about doing a more serious one, with the possibility of adding estimations, perhaps maintaining a product backlog and why not providing a burndown chart. Anyway, the interface is still a little bit primitive (only accepts maps of strings). Cheers,
ReplyDelete-fede