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My own burn down chart

chartLike many software developers loving development, I spend a large part of my personal time on development projects. Some of them originate from relatives' or friends' requests. When they ask me for a delivery date, I try to commit to the date I give them. Name this pride or simply good project management Wink. But in any case I have the need of a (simple) tool for project planning and tracking.

Some time ago, I spent two or three days  in looking for such a tool. I installed and tested (thank you, Docker!) several web applications: Taiga, Kanboard, Agilefant... But none of them fulfilled all my expectations:

  • simple to use
  • feature backlog (more or less the backlog of the scrum method)
  • list of (technical) tasks per feature, with planned effort for every task
  • grouping of tasks to be run over a short period of time (more or less the sprint of the scrum method)
  • estimated end time of every sprint (yes, I don't work with fixed-length sprints)
  • tracking of spent effort per task
  • burn down chart for every sprint, based on tasks (that's a good incentive Smile)

Finally, I created a simple spreadsheet, and validated it with my lightning flash detector project. I'm now happy with it. The only drawback: it's not shared via a web application. But that's not a real problem: I store it in project's Gitlab repository and consequently can access it as easily as I access my source code.

Here are some screenshots. First, the backlog page:

backlog

Then, the sprint view:

sprint

And the "user guide":

guide

The spreadsheet file is available on GitHub. It is in LibreOffice format.

Update - 13-Feb-2017: tasks not closed in a sprint can now be carried on in next sprint.

Update - 19-Dec-2016: I updated the spreadsheet file so that it can now handle small teams (up to 5 developers).