Infrastructure Made Easy for Agile Software Teams

Posted by Vikas Hazrati on Nov 12, 2008

Sections

Process & Practices,

Development

Topics

Artifacts & Tools ,

Agile ,

Agile in the Enterprise

Tags

Productivity ,

Products

The Agile Manifesto values "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" however often the right mix of tools and processes acts as a catalyst to the success of Agile teams. With the increasing adoption of Agile and the fact that many teams work in distributed environments, having the right infrastructure becomes an important ingredient for Agile teams to succeed. More often than not, setting up the infrastructure quickly is a daunting task as it involves configuring various tools to work together. Thanks to toolsets like Buildix and Assembla, infrastructure challenged teams can now quickly get past toolset configuration issues and get on with the work.

Jose Noheda noted,

Trying to build this [Agile] kind of environment from scratch is difficult, believe me. But it is worth the effort.

Buildix makes it easy to set up the Agile ecosystem through a single installer. Buildix includes

• Subversion for Source Control
• Mingle for Agile Project Management
• Cruise Control for Continuous Integration
• Trac as a wiki and bug-tracker

Buildix can be deployed on Ubuntu and can also be used from the LiveCD.

Taking a step further, Assembla provides a hosted infrastructure for Agile teams to kick start easily. They provide online workspaces for unlimited number of team members to collaborate, communicate and code. The list of standard tools includes

• A simple Wiki
• Message Board
• Subversion for Source Control
• Trac as a wiki and bug-tracker
• Time reporting
• Chat
• Project Milestones and charts
• Dashboard
• Twitter

Other additional features include member profiles, branding and staffing lists. Agile teams can chose between a free public plan in which the projects details are public and a paid private plan with additional features.

This is what KillerStartups had to say about this suite:

Users of Assembla.com get free workspaces with everything that you need to organize and equip your distributed team, bundled in a Web 2.0 package with a 60 second registration process. The most popular feature is free subversion, with trac and a convenient real-time alert system.

Initiatives like these are trying to abstract infrastructure related worries away from the Agile teams. These toolsets bundle popular productivity tools together allowing Agile teams to be more productive right from the start.

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   Interesting question about Buildx

   by Mark Levison

   Buildx (according the ThoughtWorks website is free), so what exactly do you get with Mingle ($$$$)?

   Reply

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   Re: Interesting question about Buildx

   by Vikas Hazrati

   As per their site, Mingle would now be included as a part of Buildix. Not sure if they just have an eval version there.

   Reply

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