How to Mingle
They’ll see: story cards hanging all over anything a bit of blue tack will stick to; post-its of every color highlighting open questions and pressing issues; wide open spaces arranged to facilitate collaboration; people shuffling cards around; stand-up meetings; build tokens and lava lamps. The list goes on.
Of course you can hear it too. There's a constant buzz as customers ("The Truth"), analysts, testers, developers and managers share their angle and collaborate through the tasks at hand.
Look closer and you'll see a bang up-to-date project wiki including stories, defects, design discussions, risks and issues. You'll also see a burn-up chart based on real time tracking of real information (i.e. passing tests) and a working system, NOT "guesstimations" of "80% complete".
At ThoughtWorks, these obvious visualizations and behaviors are at the core of everything we do. We've been looking for years for a tool that captures, supports and reinforces them. We couldn't find one so we created it ourselves. That's what Mingle is all about.
We hope you'll enjoy it as much as we've enjoyed creating it for you.
Comments > (HTML is allowed)
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Alan FrancisMarch 9th, 2007 @ 09:13 PM
Hi Cyndi, Are there any screenshots available ? A.
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Zac ZavosMarch 12th, 2007 @ 12:41 PM
Hi Alan, We'll be putting screenshots up very shortly. Sign-up for the blog-alerts to be alerted when this happens.
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Claudio PerroneMarch 26th, 2007 @ 05:52 PM
Excellent news, I'm looking forward to see it in action!
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Mike WApril 2nd, 2007 @ 09:15 PM
Are there any existing tools that will already do this kind of thing? Who are your competitors?
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Zac ZavosApril 3rd, 2007 @ 06:42 AM
Hi Mike, a quick search on agile project management will bring back lots of competitors, both open source and commercial. All the products approach Agile software delivery in a different way. We're focusing on what we hear from our customers and teams on what they need in a tool to manage and deliver agile projects. As Cyndi writes, the highly visual elements of good projects and up to date reporting are an important part of Mingle.
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Roberto FerraraApril 25th, 2007 @ 08:13 AM
As you described, if a team is doing project management using big visible charts, story walls and etc why would they need a tool like Mingle? Are you recommending this tool for distributed teams?
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Cyndi MitchellApril 26th, 2007 @ 12:04 PM
It certainly gives a huge boost to distributed teams. But another big reason is tracking and reporting even on co-located teams. It's nice to have a single place to capture requirements, estimates, actuals, priorities, issues, risks, etc. This makes it easy to generate status reports for the various stakeholders and easily keeps everyone on the same page. There are many tools out there already that do this. But many teams don't like to use them because they go against the grain of how they like to work. As soon as the tool gets in their way the team slows down and eventually they will stop using it altogether (or use it only when their manager forces them to). If it slows them down, they get less work done. If they stop using it, the data in the tool falls out of synch with the "data" in the team room. Either way, it's not great. So our goal is to make Mingle the tool that teams using big visible charts, story walls, etc. actually want to use. This of course means it has to mold to the way they want to work.
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JeremyMay 26th, 2007 @ 02:54 AM
It's very interesting... Cyndi, Thats really great news.
