Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Managing Agile Development & Engineering: Phragile

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• Agile Development & Engineering: Phragile

Summary

Phragile is a tool that generates burn down charts, burn up charts and sprint oberviews for the Phabricator boards of agile software projects. It supports scrum masters, product managers, and agile software development teams in their daily work. We'd like to explain the initial idea that lead to the development of the tool, and how we at Wikimedia Deutschland worked together with the Wikimedia Foundation during the requirement analysis.

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Agile Development & Engineering: Phragile

Phragile showing a burnup chart of a sprint

When we started to develop Wikidata in April 2012, it was clear from the very beginning that we were going to follow agile principles. We had a whiteboard as scrum board in our office and we maintained stories and epics in a wiki. Bugs and tasks were maintained in Bugzilla. That was not the optimal way, so we were continuously looking for alternatives to better manage our agile processes. That’s how we discovered Scrumbugz and – after some struggles with the confusing setup – started using it for burndown charts and reports. When the Wikimedia Foundation replaced Bugzilla with Phabricator Maniphest in late 2014, we needed to think again about how we could best visualize our sprints and how to automatically generate burndown charts from the sprint boards in Phabricator. That’s how Phragile got started.

Phragile’s main goal is to add a visualization and aggregation layer on top of Phabricator. It dynamically generates sprint overviews including burnup, burndown and status distribution charts for Phabricator projects.

Create a new sprint directly on Phragile

Phragile was initially developed by Jakob Warkotsch as a bachelor thesis project at Freie Universität Berlin in cooperation with the software engineering department of Wikimedia Deutschland. During the initial development phase, Jakob was advised by Abraham Taherivand (Head of Software Engineering) and Tobias Gritschacher (Scrum Master). Later the project was taken over by a software development team at Wikimedia Deutschland. After the demo of the first working prototype in March 2015 the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland worked together on a shared vision of Phragile and came up with a roadmap of features that would fulfill the additional requirements of the WMF. A lot of valuable feedback was gathered during the MediaWiki Hackathon in Lyon in May which allowed both parties to sit together in person to discuss and hack on new Phragile features. The collaboration resulted in several great additions like burnup charts, chart data export, automatic snapshots of chart data and automated deployments on Wikimedia Labs.

Connect Phragile with a Phabricator project

Currently Phragile is deployed on Wikimedia Labs and is used by the product management and the Scrum Master of Wikimedia Deutschland in several software projects such as Wikidata and by the team that works on the technical wishes list. Also the Wikimedia Foundation requested to enable several projects on Phragile such as Wikipedia-iOS-App or WikidataQueryService.

Phragile is under active development and will further evolve over the next year. One big upcoming feature would be to support and visualize user stories. An overview of Phragile’s currently supported features can be found on GitHub and a roadmap of upcoming features is available on Phabricator.

Jens Ohlig (WMDE), Wikimedia Deutschland

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