XPlanner – A Tool for Scrum

XPlanner (http://www.xplanner.org/) is web based tool for Agile Project Development. It helps

in Sprint planning , daily updation of the burn down, assigning and tracking efforts for different user

stories, creation of tasks for each user story, assigning tasks and also reporting and export options.

Before we get to the details regarding this let us explore the need for a tool in Agile

programming methodology. When you have more than a few user stories running parallel and more

than five or six people working on different tasks, it becomes pretty hard for the scrum master or

anyone to get an overview of the sprint, and the status of the different user stories.

While tasks boards with paste it notes and white boards with the sprint burn down charts are

simple ways to provide this visibility, the user who wants these details electronically for easier

reporting,archiving or other reasons will naturally try to use the spread sheet application to incorporate

this. Also for teams that are not co located the physical representation and tracking techniques may not

work at all. The spread sheet though a simple and effective tool has both its advantages as well as

disadvantages. Soon the Scrum Master or the team will find that putting formulas and auto generating

graphs and reports give them the leverage that they were looking for. Quite often this simple

spreadsheet can in the end lead to very complex and unwieldy spread sheets, loaded with macros and

formulas that is both confusing to the user and brittle in its structure.

Then there are a lot of commercial and a few open source tools. While tools like AgileInfant,

XPlanner, IceScrum ,Agilo are given in the website -http://www.agile-tools.net/ which keeps the list of

Open source management tools, other than XPlanner I have personally not tried the rest. So I will be

discussing about this tool in the rest of the this discourse. As is mentioned in the site XPlanner has the

most comprehensive feature set among the rest.

XPlanner is primarily targeted at the management of Xtreme programming paradigm. But this

can be used for Scrum methodology also without any change, maybe with the exception of a few

naming convention changes. So in Scrum what we call sprint is called an iteration in XPlanner.

XPlanner provides an easy use interface to the team to update the daily scrum and generates the

burn down automatically. Further it provides at a glance the status of the entire scrum to which ever

granular detail you need, whether at the sprint level, or at the user story level or at the task level. It also

has a neat facility where in you can move user stories or tasks under the user stories to different sprints.

This comes in very hand during sprint planning and also for de-scoping user stories.

XPlanner is pretty easy to set up. It needs a database and a servlet engine. We have used

MySQL as the database and Apache Tomcat as the servlet engine. It takes around thirty to forty minutes

to set up, assuming that you are new to both Apache and MySQL set up, may be sometimes even less

or more. Also since we are using this as the prime engine for our Scrum management we have also

written a script to do a daily backup of the MySQL database. In case you are facing any trouble with

XPlanner installation or usage you can try the discussion group for help -

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=161120 .

One of the weakness in XPlanner is that its documentation is pretty limited. But it is pretty

straight forward to use. It is a very versatile tool and you may have to run it for a sprint to get a good

idea of how to use it and also to model it appropriate for your usage. I am putting a few screen shots

below which will give you an idea of the various features of this tool, and also how I have customized

it to suite our Scrum methodology.

Logging In

This is a no frills standard web application and presents the default login screen

Modeling Projects and User Stories

You can use the Add Project link to create projects. Once a project is created you have to plan

the iterations/sprint for each project and then add user stories to each sprint. This gives you the

versatility needed to plan according to your context. If you are the scrum master for a number of

projects, you can model like how I have modeled. That is create project for all the analyzed features

first.

Then to group the user stories for each feature , create a dummy iteration for each project and call it the

'Sprint Backlog' and then add the user stories and effort relevant to that project under that .

At this stage we have all the planned features as Project and all the user stories under each project.

Now to collect and group the user stories taken up by a particular scrum team and to manage the

sprints planned for the release, we create a new project called Agile Sprint Planner , which is actually a

dummy project,and then create different iterations (using 'Create Iterations' ) link to create

iterations/sprints to model the sprints planned for the release.

Each running sprint should have the planned user stories. During the sprint planning, user stories are

moved from the respective FRN to the desired sprint. XPlanner provides the feature to move the user

stories from one project to another very easily. So using this feature you can easily move the user

stories from the Backlog defined for each project to the current active sprint.

Moving User Stories

You can use the link with the blue arrow to the left of each user story to move user stories across from

the original feature to the new project created for managing the sprints. This is done during sprint

planning.

Selecting the user story of a feature to be move to the planned sprint.

A view of the planned Sprint

A view of the user stories moved from various projects to the current sprint is given below. Note the

Hours Remaining . This gives at a glance the hours remaining for all the user stories together in the

sprint. Also the progress related to each user story is shown graphically. This is updated dynamically

whenever the user updates the tasks related to each user story, i.e when the sprint is in progress.

Viewing the User Story status in each Sprint

Clicking on the iteration will give a picture of the current status of the Sprint. That is the number of

hours remaining for all the user stories together, as well as the progress of each of the user stories.

Completed user stories are marked in light green, while ongoing user stories are marked with a blue bar

indicating the percentage completed for each user story.

Checking My Tasks – The Me link

The Me link in the top right corner of the page provides a way to view all the task related to you,

whether you are tracking the tasks or

Updating Efforts the Scrum way – Left to Do

In XPlanner we have the option to specify the effort remaining in each task rather than just updating the

hours worked in each task. Though this statement may sound simple it is one of the biggest paradigm

shift when moving towards agile development. Supposing that a task is estimated to take 12 hours .A

person may work 12 hours on the task.; in the tend of the day he gets a better idea of the task and

estimates that he may require 8 more hours to complete the task. So the remaining hours should be 8. It

has no relation to the amount of work done.

Tracking the User Story Progress for each Scrum Meeting

Firstly select the Sprint Start time till to date and click the Submit Button. XPlanner Provides

the hours burned down for each user story. Clicking on a column heading (here in this case hours) sorts

the output. It also displays in a pie chart (see image below) the hours burned down in each user story.

Viewing the Burn Down Chart

The burned down chart is calculated nightly by XPlanner and is available for the daily Scrum meeting

Clicking under the Charts link under each iteration gives you the access to this page

View of the Tasks under each user story

Other features

XPlanner also provides user management as well as a lot of nifty features like export to xml,pdf

as well as exporting task cards. Here are a few screen shots relating to user management.

Using the edit button you can grant access to the user for only the project/projects he is

concerned with.

Note here that other than the regular users I have created user (ex 2923) for each running FRN.

I assign these users as customers for the user story so that I can easily sort then in the sprint

backlog.

Well, these are some of the screens that I found would be useful. As you can see this is a very feature rich tool and from my experience it is very stable also. We are satisfied using this for our Sprints, and I believe it is a productivity add. The only way you can decide if this is suited for you is to try this out yourself.

References

Project Home - http://www.xplanner.org/Download - http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=49017Agile Tools - http://www.agile-tools.net/