Agile Tools for Agile Performance

We invest these days in our team, turning it into Agile. This way we expect to bring sooner and better products to market.
We selected Agilo by Agile42 as out task, bug and Wiki product. This a Trac based product that has the following pros:

1. It is based on Trac, so it includes all the common Trac features: road map, bugs, tasks and Wiki in a single product
   
2. It is customized to Agile methodology including:
1. White board (pro version)
2. Sprints, Milestones
3. Sprint Dashboard with Sprint Burndown, closure tickets rate and commitment charts
   
3. It has better UI that Trac
   
4. It has great packaging for instant installation (Trac instant installation can be find in BitNami).
   
5. Its community version is free (it has pro version with several extra features such as white board)

 Some useful info if you turn to Agilo: 

1. Agilo installation
2. Installing Agilo as a Windows service
1.  Download the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit from Microsoft
2.  Install the service according to MS
3. Update:  Change in run.bat the set VIRTUAL_ENV=%cd% to set VIRTUAL_ENV=%Agilo%. Create the Agilo system variable with a value that matched the path where the run.bat file is located at.
3.  Avoid errors
   
1. "The password file could not be updated. Trac requires read and write access to both the password file and its parent directory": Change TrustedInstaller and Users permissions on the tracenv directory
2. Got "acct_mgr.web_ui.MessageWrapper", well, open the trac.db and run DELETE FROM session_attribute to solve this issue.
4. Control your source code
1. If your SVN is not on the Trac/Agilo machine, you should use SVNSync to make a local SVN read only copy:
   svnsync synchronize http://localhost/svn/project --sync-username slaveuser --sync-password tjohej --source-password password
   c:\Python25\Scripts\trac-admin.exe c:\projects\trac\project\ resync
   
5. Modifications
1. Changing attached user files size for tickets and wiki (Update May 22, 2010) using the max_size parameter in trac.ini.
6. Control your sprint
1. You should add priority field to the task in order to support any prioritization
2. You should add bug association with the sprint in order to see both in the same presentation
   
3. Agilo seperates between bugs and tasks (however, you probably manage both in the same sprint), therefore we created a report that controls all issues:
   query:?status=accepted
   &status=assigned
   &status=closed
   &status=new
   &status=reopened
   &status=review
   &order=priority
   &col=id
   &col=summary
   &col=status
   &col=owner
   &col=type
   &col=priority
   &col=component
   &col=severity
   &col=remaining_time
   &col=drp_resources
   &sprint=SPRINT_NAME

More goodies to follow,

Keep Performing,
Moshe Kaplan