Trac in a Scrum team : What are the best plugins / hacks ?

Question

I want to setup a Trac server to support my developer team work along with Bitten as a Continuous Integration server.

We are using the Scrum development process.

What are the Trac's plugins, hacks, macros or configurations I could use to fit my team needs ?

Answer 1

The most feature rich plugin for Trac you should look into is the free Agilo for Scrum.

It gives you very importent features when working with SCRUM like:

• Requirement, Task, User Story and Bug Ticket Types, each with different fieldsets like Story Points, Business Value Points ...
• Tickets can now be linked, for example you want your Tasks to be associated with a Requirement
• Product Owner, Scrum Master and "Team Member" user roles / permissions
• Users can be divided into Teams and their work capacity can be entered
• Beautiful Burndown Charts and other Reports
• Story Points / Time calculation
• SCRUM Sprints in addition to Milestones
• Spring Backlogs and Product Backlogs + you can define your own Backlogs

Answer 2

I used to test the TimeVisualizerPlugin to draw the Burndown charts. I was using Components and Milestones to represent projects and sprints (including product backlog).

It seems that Agilo for Scrum is much more scrum focused.

I'll try it and will report my conclusions here.

I'm still looking to improve our trac user experience... Any other thoughts ?

Answer 3

We are currently using Trac without Agilo for Scrum, because we haven't found it before the project started und did not yet switch to it.

So I have a few tips for running Trac in a Scrum project without it:

1. Customize your ticket types

Go into your trac admin and configure a new ticket type for product backlog items (like ... "requirement", or just "product backlog")

This is importent, because later on you can create reports based on the ticket type.

2. Customize your tickets

You should add two new properties to your tickets: "Story points" and "Remaining time."

Open your trac.ini file (located in the conf directory of your Trac instance) and add a new (?) area in the file:

[ticket-custom]
remaining_time = text
remaining_time.label = Remaining time
story_points = select
story_points.label = Story points
story_points.options = |0|1|2|3|5|8|13
story_points.value = 0

3. Create customized reports

You will need some custom reports, like a report showing all the product backlog items, etc.

Answer 4

We also use Agilo. It's not bug free, but I like it. It's good tool support for a typical scrum project. The Agilo team also has good support and they are working on new features as well.

Answer 5

Agilo for Scrum has now many new features like an online whiteboard and we are really happy with it.

Answer 6

Just the answer I was looking for.

PS: I love this site more and more every day.

Answer 7

I've just found Itteco Trac Plugin dedicated to agile project management :

• Hierarchical milestones
• Cross-references between tickets
• Basic scope management
• Whiteboards

I'm going to try it on my Trac server. Did anyone try it before ?

Answer 8

The core Scrum utility we use is the EstimationToolsPlugin for visualization (since the custom ticket field is technically built in, and works).

We have a lot of other utilities we use to assist, but are not necessarily Scrum itself. We use the TicketTemplatePlugin in order to unify / templatize the expected information in a ticket.

And we installed the FullBlogPlugin in order to have a common method of documenting the overview of the work done during a given sprint. It just works better than Wiki pages.

We also put custom ticket workflows to use. Instead of New -> Assigned -> Closed, we have resolved and two verification steps. An engineer resolves a ticket, the intended/affected party or responsible owner verifies it, and on delivery/acceptance, the relevant tickets are "closed", as the final resolution state.