Forest for the Trees

How many of us have participated in a project in which the estimates made at the beginning of a project no longer hold weight after days or weeks of the project have gone by? Chances are that all of us have. This is generally because a number of things impact estimates, including the team's comfort with each other, familiarity with the technology and understanding of the business domain. We know from experience that trying to predict the size of the system during inception can be fraught with risk. Nonetheless, project stakeholders still ask the critical questions they need answered in order to budget and schedule projects early in the game. Namely: How big is it?

Traditional Agile radiators of team performance such as burn-up or finger charts are focused on progress against a backlog of work and the highlighting of process bottlenecks. What these visualizations do not do is provide us with a picture of the team's overall understanding of the problem space, and thus a feel for how reliable their estimates and progress are. For example, an increase in scope on a burn-up chart could easily be misinterpreted as out-of-control scope, whereas it might be a refinement of previous requirements.


This is where Story Trees become a useful visualization for external stakeholders to better understand scoping efforts.

Those that are familiar with Agile approaches to software development are also familiar with the idea of a user story being a deliverable unit of business value within the context of a system. Using a variety of approaches, teams can gather together a representative set of experts regarding a particular domain and hash out the relevant personas, goals and actions that the system needs to fulfill in order to meet the needs of a particular business function or user community. User stories have presented a very simple mechanism for breaking down a complex domain problem into simpler bits to understand, but they often mask many of the implementation details that contribute to the cost of delivery of that story and as a result, the entire project. Story Trees, whose benefits are also articulated here by Amit Rathore, provide a simple structure for showing how user stories relate in a broader solution.

With Mingle's new feature, Card Trees, we are breaking new ground in how a team can visualize project complexity. First, we have built into Mingle the power to visually define parent-child relationships between cards on your project. What is unique about our approach is that we allow you to have trees for varied perspectives and roles: a project manager may wish to have a planning tree that indicates a work breakdown structure while a business analyst may want to use Story Trees to demonstrate a functional decomposition. At the same time, a QA team may want to break down testing scenarios into more granular cases.



Second, we provide you with tools to capture metrics at any level and aggregate them according to the hierarchies you design. These could be simple metrics like estimates, or calculations like the Time-To-Life of a requirement or defect; in themselves they have meaning, however, totaled or averaged across a planning period, they take on new life.



With these tools, Story Trees become a reality as the team is able to break down complex concepts into manageable units of work. Since Card Trees are implemented in Mingle's flexible work model, they can be easily sorted and reported on as new uses for the data emerge. Because Mingle allows you to define and capture metrics at any point during the project, you add data only as you need it, rather than at the start of the project. Finally, because Mingle does the work of crunching the data, you can spend time doing what you do best: working with your team rather than spreadsheets.

In the next few weeks, with the release of Mingle 2.0, we will invite you to plant your own trees and let us know what takes root.

Comments > (HTML is allowed)

1. Rik Meijer

   February 25th, 2008 @ 05:08 PM

   This is great ! We are currently evaluating your product for use at our academic institution and this really is the feature we currently miss (and better memory use...yes..) Keep up the good work ! Thanks, Rik Meijer - Student @ Avans Netherlands

2. Ketan Padegaonkar

   February 27th, 2008 @ 08:37 AM

   The screenshots look amazing. When do mere mortals like us get to see this ?

3. Celso Pinto

   February 28th, 2008 @ 10:12 AM

   Will it be possible for a card to have multiple parents? For example, can a task be related to multiple stories?

4. Clemens

   March 8th, 2008 @ 12:20 PM

   This looks great. Some old approaches (stepwise refinement, functional decomposition) seem renaissancing ;-) I manage projects, where packaged applications (standard ERP and other "out-of-to-box"-software) are introduced into business. And these packages are huge, not stories, not story trees, not epics, but sagas! Hierarchies are needed to breakdown these sagas into chewable chunks! I can hardly wait to see 2.0, pls keep me informed.

5. markm

   March 14th, 2008 @ 09:04 AM

   Any update on the 2.0 release? Card trees are pretty essential for Mingle to work well with Scrum.

6. Ben Scherrey

   March 16th, 2008 @ 06:28 PM

   We're very interested in trying out Mingle 2.0. We gave 1.0 and 1.1 a shot but they were resource pigs and not quite ready for prime time - at least not worth the price being asked. We hope 2.0's gonna break that issue for us... are we there yet? ...are we there yet? ...are we there yet? :)

7. Chris Sellers

   March 20th, 2008 @ 04:19 PM

   Pretty please!!! Love, love, love the Mingle interface, but hate, hate, hate the performance :(

8. Rusty

   March 21st, 2008 @ 07:07 AM

   I have to throw a bg, 'huh?" out with regards to performance. I am simultaneously evaluating mingle, rallyDev and versionOne. RallyDev performs quite well but V1 is not cutting the mustard. Both are hosted solutions. I would expect their hardware to outperform our small office setup. I have Mingle installed on an HP Athlon personal computer with 3G ram and its mighty fast. On that machine I only have cruisecontrol.net, subversion and mingle. My 2cent is that Mingle performs very well for what it does. Keep the change...

9. Eli Weir

   March 28th, 2008 @ 04:23 PM

   @Rusty - As somone who has used both Rally and V1, I can state that hosting your own installation of V1 gives you superfast performance. Using their hosted trial is not a good indication of the power or flexibility of the package. As to Mingle, I have watched the product evoloution with interest, and 2.0 has me itching for a trial.

10. Simon

    April 4th, 2008 @ 04:53 PM

    I have been trying 2.0 EA at a client site (f500 regulated beast). I must say, it's an impressive release. I can go into the the +/- of each feature and how it compares to V1 and Rally, but that's not what's standing out in my mind. And forget about the elegance of the UI. I think Mingle sets a new standard in the area of human factors. What I have noticed since the 1st release is, these guys are churning out software FAST! If you have not seen 2.0, take a look at it. Email the Mingle guys and ask them for access. In my view, the have surpassed V1 and Rally. So, the question that I have put forward to my client is, for each of the vendors you are looking at, where will they be 6 months from today? My take is, Mingle will trounce the rest of the market for a few reasons: 1) they really seem to know how to build software that humans want to use. 2) they know how to build it fast. they seem to have a 75% speed advantage 3) they are not locking you in to a given approach. Mingle is something special in its ability to give you exactly what you need from a process and reporting perspective, but also be 100% process agnostic out of the box. 4) the people i spoke to there said they have over 100 million in sales, so they are not your typical start-up hoping to make it or get bought. Note, this 100M # includes the parent, who owns the software group. Anyway, it's good stuff. I would love to see what their dev team/approach/environment looks like. Probably can learn a lot from that as well. HEY MINGLERS, PUBLISH A WHITE PAPER ON THE BUILDING OF MINGLE!!!! P.S. I am not one of those ruby wild eyed kids...

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