Welcome to Pale Purple's Virtual Planning Board

What?

The Virtual planning board is a web application that allows you to tie in visual project planning with your existing Trac tickets - across a range of projects (where each project has a seperate svn repository and associated trac instance). It allows you to assign tickets to a particular week and therefore plan your workflow for a given period. Soon you'll be able to do simple project estimation with a 'developer hours' feature that compares available hours to the estimated times on the tickets

Why?

At Pale Purple we've always tried to follow some form of agile development process. We like to keep our documentation and planning processes light but full. By that I mean that we want to have all the information at our fingertips, but we don't want to spend a lot of time rewriting plans, rearranging gantt charts or doing other things that we hate. (We do insist on some traditional 'heavyweight' documentation but that is almost always all at the customer end to ensure that we've got a fallback in case of scope disagreements etc).

We used to solve our problems by having a simply cork board, split up into weeks. On those weeks we would pin cards with a simple title, project name, time estimate and reference to a trac ticket. Developers would then pin their name onto the card when they were working on something. Calculations about estimated vs available time would be done manually (which was annoying but there was no better way!). We'd move the board around each week and therefore see when work had not been completed. This was good as a rough guide to how well we'd estimated things that week, or how much non-planned work had slipped through.

Also, we don't always work in one place, so while a planning board in the office is nice, it can be difficult when someone is at home and needs to see what the next priority ticket is.

We wanted a better way that didn't involve rewriting stuff onto cards or other things that developers without a project manager (said project manager soon to be unavailable due to maternity leave!) would just not do! We'd got everyone into the habit of using trac and svn properly and wanted to make use of that.

Screenshots

There are some screenshots embedded within the UserGuide

License

Code written by Pale Purple is licensed under the GPL. We have used a number of libraries (e.g. Propel, Smarty etc) which are licensed under their own terms; normally this is an LGPL or BSD style license.

Code written by us will have a clear header stating our ownership of the code, and the license it is released under - for instance :

/**
 * @copyright Pale Purple Ltd - http://www.palepurple.co.uk/ - © 2006 onwards.
 * @licence GPL v2 or later - as specified in the LICENCE.txt file in the root of this project.
 */

How?

You can see a basic UserGuide on this wiki, and we'll add to it as we add more features. We're currently running a read-only svn repository, but would be happy to accept patches, and if anyone wants to contribute regularly can discuss write access.

The Science bit

Because of all of the different components etc involved, setup is currently not a simple task. Please refer to the InstallationGuide for all the details on this topic.

Notes

• The design is currently optimised for a 19" monitor as that's what we all use in the office. We're working on making it more flexible and will have sorted something before release. In the meantime, it all still works on smaller screens, it just looks a bit crap.

Feedback

If you have any suggestions, ideas or need to contact us for help, you can reach us at support at palepurple.co.uk.