Project management tools

Mingle and Trello are proprietary project management tools. Some teams at the Foundation use them in addition to the open source Bugzilla tool.

Mingle
The purpose of Mingle is to plan your work and keep track of who did what along the way. The Foundation is using Mingle as part of a push toward adoption of an Agile approach to software development, for which Mingle was specifically built. Mingle is made by ThoughtWorks, and ThoughtWorks has done a few training sessions at the Foundation about adopting Agile processes in general. Mingle somewhat duplicates functionality present in Bugzilla, but can be integrated with both that and some version control systems.

Wikimedia Foundation installation

 * URL: https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/
 * Secondary URL (for some teams): https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/

The server hosting the installation is, as of September 2012, managed by WMF Office IT technical team.

Teams using Mingle

 * Analytics
 * Core features (Flow project)
 * Fundraising
 * i18n
 * Mobile
 * Wikidata (Wikimedia Deutschland)

Trello
Trello is a lighter-weight project management tool, lacking Mingle's story points, velocity, story hierarchy, etc. Several Wikimedia Foundation projects, including Wikipedia Zero, design, notifications, research/data analysis, and Growth, are using Trello boards, which collectively paid for with a "Business Class" license. Though it is closed source, non-members of Trello boards can view and comment on cards, and all data is exportable in open formats if we decide Trello is not for us.

You can see all WMF boards at trello.com/wikimediafoundation

How much do Mingle and Trello cost per year?

 * Trello Business Class costs $25/month ($200 a year)

What are the alternatives to Mingle and Trello?
The following are very popular alternatives in the context of Mingle's approach, which is roughly similar to other scrum task boards or Kanban boards. They may not necessarily be viable alternatives, but since we're already using a closed source tool, this list should probably include them. MediaWiki itself is a candidate for this list if you want include instances where people use non-specialized tools.

In somewhat hazy order of popularity and suitability for this use case:


 * Pivotal Tracker. Closed source, but wildly popular in the Agile crowd.
 * 1) Fulcrum, an open source Pivotal Tracker clone
 * 2) various extensions and dashboards for Bugzilla, mostly developed by Mozilla
 * GreenHopper + JIRA. Popular but closed source and often a bear. Not particularly attractive for our needs.
 * Trac. More project management than Agile development
 * Redmine. More project management than Agile development
 * 1) iceScrum. Opensource, made for agile (cards, automatic graphics). Code integration only in the separate commercial version.

Typical Wikimedia Foundation project customizations

 * rename Defect to Bug
 * recolor Bug red and Story green
 * add Bug ID card property (any number, only for Bug cards)