Steve On Java

Followers of my blog have probably heard about the Apropos project that I built in JavaFX and released as open-source.  It is an Agile Project Portfolio Planning tool that I developed for work to help manage our large Agile rollout. Apropos is a perfect application of rich client technology, because it sits on top of the web services exposed by Rally, and provides a higher level of visibility and planning.

The folks at Rally Software took notice and have been contributing back to the project to get it customer ready.  They have branded the commercial version of the tool Stratus and are now in the process of a customer beta.

Some of the features that the Rally folks have added to Stratus include:

• Customization of fields and settings
• Performance improvements in the web service communication
• Styling and usability improvements throughout
• A fully hosted environment for customers to use Stratus without any setup

I had the opportunity to present with Ryan Martens, Rally CTO, at the JavaOne Keynote to demonstrate the very latest version:

It was a cool experience to be on the big stage.  I have heard that a lot of presenters get scripted to death in preparation for Keynotes (or at least it always looks that way), but I had a lot of freedom to ad-lib and blend in my demo with Ryan’s talk.

If you or your company are interested in piloting Stratus, send email to stratus@rallydev.com and Rally can engage with your program managers.

At the Lean Software and Systems Conference a week ago, Israel Gat, Erik Huddleston, and I did a presentation on Reformulating the Product Delivery Process.  At the end of this talk, we unveiled an open-source, JavaFX tool called Apropos that we use for Product Portfolio Planning at Inovis.

Note: The data has been blurred to hide corporate information.  The final release will include a test bed of public data, which can be used for display and testing.

What you are seeing in the above screenshot is the Portfolio Kanban View that we use for tracking features through their full lifecycle from proposal through validation.  It is backed by the Rally Agile Lifecycle Management tool, which exposes Web Services for accessing all of our planning data.  The entire UI was written in JavaFX, and makes heavy use of JFXtras features, such as the XTableView.

The plan for this tool is to do the initial launch of a BSD-licensed open-source version on May 22nd.  This will include support for the Rally Community Edition, which is free for up to 10 users.  In future releases we plan to support other Agile Lifecycle Management tools, both commercial and open-source, but will need assistance from the community to do this.

If you are interested in helping out with this project, please contact me.  I will have limited bandwidth until after the initial launch, but after that would love to scale up this project with interested parties.

Here is the full presentation, which includes additional screenshots of Apropos at the end (slides 15-19):