A Preview of Mingle 2.0

Posted by Ben Hughes on Apr 11, 2008

Sections

Process & Practices,

Development

Topics

Collaboration ,

Artifacts & Tools ,

Agile ,

JRuby ,

Agile in the Enterprise

Tags

Planning ,

Productivity ,

Mingle ,

Rails

On April 15th Thoughtworks will release Mingle 2.0, nine months after the initial release of Mingle. InfoQ got some time with product manager Adam Monago to talk through the new functionality provided by Mingle 2.0. Amongst a plethora of fixes and new functionality in the release the most notable are:

• Card Trees - Mingle now uses the concept of card trees to display relationships between features, cards, defects and any other configurable entities in the system. Also it allows different views of the trees, for example a Planning view or a Developers view.
• Cross-project reporting and one-click visibility at any level of detail - program, project, requirement or even team members can be reported on cross-project, allowing Mingle to be used as a program management tool. Charts & tables from Mingle project wikis can be securely used in the programme roll up view.
• Calculation of key metrics across projects - Mingle 2.0 has the functionality to calcuate metrics from across the project using formulae, some examples of which are weighted estimate averages and average time to fix defects.
• Aggregation of properties - Mingle 2.0 aggregates (or rolls up) key project metrics (including custom ones (see above)). For example task estimetes are rolled up into story estimates, which ultimately end up in release estimates.
• Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and plug-ins to easily integrate Mingle with existing project infrastructure - Mingle now has a full set of Restful API's and a burgeoning community of developers, willing to share their experiences. such as Minglyn (due to be released on CodeHaus on the 15th.).
• Promotion of almost any artefact to a Tab - to enable easy customisation and bookmarking of favourite pages.
• Inclusion of more preconfigured Templates & Metrics - such as burndown/burnup charts and project templates.

Also in the mix, the Mingle team are releasing a Perforce connector and rearchitected some parts of Mingle to enable users to write their own plugins using the API.

Plans on the board for Mingle include promotion of an online Mingle community and greater user personlisation features. Pricing structure is also looking to change, with an Annual and Perpetual license supplementing the pay per seat monthly license.

Mingle 2.0 will be available from 15th April.

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   Memory usage

   by Richard Cowin

   It will be interesting to see if they have reduced the memory footprint from 1GB RAM.

   Reply

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   Worth Taking Another Look at Now

   by Nicholas Cancelliere

   When Mingle first came out I was disappointed in a lot of ways, and especially felt it was not worth the per-user license fee they were charging. Mingle 2.0 might have me reconsider this product. I've always liked the philosophy behind the product, but didn't feel 1.0 was ready for prime-time. My team actually voted it down (we tried it out). The new features in 2.0 are huge improvements, and I think finally now it's "ready."
   
   I still do not agree with their pricing model.

   Reply

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