Extreme management tool¶

Yeah, today Zest software released the extreme management tool .

For his graduation, Ahmad Hadi build an extreme programming management tool. He got a good grade :-)

It wasn't polished enough yet for real use, but we couldn't really continue working on it as the number of clients just kept rising. Good for business, but not good for the extreme management tool. When Maurits van Rees (my brother btw) started an internship at Zest, he was charged with finalising the darn thing. It took him just 3 months or so to get to know Plone, archgenxml and python development in general. Oh, and finishing the tool :-)

The core of the tool is OK, the last month it was mostly UI tweaks to get the interaction more smooth and elegant. Oh, and removing a lot of the workflow states, it's way easier to use than it was a month ago. Removing information where unneeded and adding it where handy.

One planned addition that I like especially is to use elements from Joel Spolsky's painless software schedules, namely having both an original estimate and a revised estimate. This solves several problems:

• If you add a task during an iteration (either because the customer wants a small addition or because you forgot something), you should really set the estimate on zero, because you didn't estimate it at the start of the iteration. But it is handy to have a good estimate.
• If something takes way less or more time than originally estimated, it helps a lot for the overview if you can revise the estimate. This way, the percentage done can be set to a more meaningful number.

Anyway: I'm really starting to like the tool for day-to-day use. And I especially love the almost hourly little improvements :-)