I have integrated Pivotal Tracker (our project management software) with Yammer (our messaging software), and now everyone on the dev team can all stay up to date with what everybody else is doing in near real-time!
Why?
When we started doing Agile (XP) here at my work 2.5 years ago, we used physical index cards for writing and organizing stories. We have a big ferrous whiteboard in the team room, and we had a swim-lane for cards in the current iteration, and another for the backlog (and others at various times as we experimented with our process). We had colored magnets that indicated the status of each story (red=not started, yellow=in progress and green=”done done”). I had advocated for the use of physical story cards over project management software because I felt that physical cards in the team room was a more ambient information radiator for us than a system that a developer might check every few hours. Also, it seemed like most of the project management tools at the time weren’t a great fit for our process, and physical cards couldn’t get any easier to organize into groups, write, toss, etc.
After a while, we discovered that our information radiator (the physical story board) wasn’t so radiant for stakeholders that aren’t developers (eg. executives and support) who don’t often come into the team room. In the time since we had initially adopted Agile, light-weight tools became available that were a better fit for our process. After working for a while with Agile Zen, we wound up deciding that Pivotal Tracker was an even better fit for us. Non-devs can log in and prioritize stories in the backlog, and check on our progress with ease. However, we missed the information radiation within the dev team that had been offered by our physical story board. (We had to actually pull up the app to see what’s going on with the rest of the team rather than just swivel your head, prompted by hearing someone walk up to the board.) Since we had also started using Yammer (to keep in sync using more real-time, less formal messages than emails), we decided that integrating Pivotal Tracker with Yammer would be a great way to get the best of both worlds. Although Pivotal Tracker already has Twitter integration, since we’re working on commercial (non-OSS) software, we thought Yammer would be a better way for us to stay synced up without potentially leaking our business strategy on a public Twitter account.
The upshot
It turns out that both Pivotal Tracker and Yammer have well-documented public APIs, so integrating the two wasn’t that hard. (Pivotal Tracker can post XML to a URL you supply any time a story is updated, and Yammer has an OAuth interface for publishing messages.) We created an email address for pivotal tracker on our corporate domain name, and created a Yammer account for it so that messages from Tracker would be visually distinct from everybody else’s normal messages. Using the integration I created, that account sends a Yammer message every time the status of a story changes, and includes a link to the story. It looks like this:
The awesomeness
With this integration in place, we now get awesome information radiation for the dev team, along with accessibility for other stakeholders. As a bonus, any devs working outside the team room (or any other team members) get the same awesomeness as those in the team room as soon as they hook up to Yammer! I published the source code for the integration to github, along with a README explaining how you can set this up for your own team: http://bit.ly/hWzW9Y