Per user roadmap summaries.

[ja11sop]

This is an interesting idea and I'll try to formulate a longer reply to why this may not make as much sense as it first seems. I also suspect it may be possible to generate a per-developer view in another way. In the approach supported by this plugin it was never envisaged that you would assign work to developers ahead of iteration planning.

I guess everyone interprets how to use iterations and milestones a little differently. I can certainly see a lot of value in per-developer statistics (if only to help developers understand how they do things better). I think this is something that should really be exposed through a query/report mechanism.

I'll come back to this issue again later when I can offer a better response than this. In the meantime feel free to add more details, use cases or examples of how you would like use such a facility (beyond what you have already said). Thanks for taking the time to articulate your need. I think this this could become an interesting discussion.

[virtualthoughts]

Replying to ja11sop:

This is an interesting idea and I'll try to formulate a longer reply to why this may not make as much sense as it first seems. I also suspect it may be possible to generate a per-developer view in another way. In the approach supported by this plugin it was never envisaged that you would assign work to developers ahead of iteration planning. I guess everyone interprets how to use iterations and milestones a little differently. I can certainly see a lot of value in per-developer statistics (if only to help developers understand how they do things better). I think this is something that should really be exposed through a query/report mechanism. I'll come back to this issue again later when I can offer a better response than this. In the meantime feel free to add more details, use cases or examples of how you would like use such a facility (beyond what you have already said). Thanks for taking the time to articulate your need. I think this this could become an interesting discussion.

I have to admit that I have never worked in an "agile" environment. The very fact that we are using Trac is only because I was lucky enough to be one of a few developers on a new project where we were given more freedom than normal. In any case my request is not coming from someone used to agile development teams. So that being said the way we do things now is rather well.. terrible, however despite that it is very common for us to zero in on individual developers to take a look at what they have on their plate and how far along they happen to be on their given tasks. So in a typical meeting we will visit each developer's tasks and basically "check in" with them to make sure everything is going well (these are weekly meetings). Today we have several excel documents that track tasks and who they are assigned to and how far along they are as well as their estimated time. Then in our meetings we go through each excel document and each developer and needless to say it is painful.

However painful we now have a much larger team and it takes a lot of effort to get people to switch to something else even if it is better. Especially the people who invested all the time into the excel docs. So in order to convince these people that your plugin could do the job of the excel docs I will need to show that it can do everything they do, but better. Sort of an uphill battle. One of the things I need to be able to do then is to show how the work is broken down per milestone (already available in this plugin) and how the work is broken down per developer (hence my request). In addition having a burndown graph or some other "visuals" that are automatically generated would provide even more incentive for them to switch. Another handy thing would be cost estimations based on the "size"/estimates for all the tasks.

All this being said... I'm not asking for a change in scope/philosophy/etc of this plugin. I'm more than willing to take what you are making and adapt it to our needs, however the more common we stay to the original plugin the better as new features/fixes become easy to take advantage of.

If possible I would like to see if I can help out the development of this plugin as I have a somewhat vested interest in seeing it mature. I have to "pitch" it to them sometime in January/February? time frame, which should be plenty of time for me to address some of the more "pressing" aspects of the features that my group would require and what is already provided.

BTW feel free to PM me if you want to talk further.

[ja11sop]

Apologies for the very slow response. Been snowed under to the extent that following-up had taken a back seat. I'll upload a basic introduction to agile development that helps provide greater insight into the ideas behind this plugin.

Per-developer tracking often does seem like a very attractive thing, but in practice I've found the perceived value far outweighs the actual value. One of things I try to emphasise where possible is that a team is just that, a team. This is a big topic that I'll come back to. I'll write a longer reply in a couple of days. Just wanted to say that your offer of help is very much appreciated. Patches are welcome also.

[dfraser]

Being able to trac what work a developer has done is helpful - we have developer pages with links to a timeline query matching their username

[ja11sop]

I'm certainly open to ideas here. Something that leveraged the existing reporting mechanism might be a good stop-gap, though currently the plugin doesn't really support that very well now either. One thing that has been that is in a similar vein but not directly related to this, is the displaying of ticket changes in an iteration time frame. This is not yet exposed but would be a nice configurable option. The bottomline though here is that this is of lower priority than some other items. Currently it is in the Undecided milestone, but if how this sort of capability could be exposed is firmed up then it would make sense to move it into one of the 'active' milestones.