Bill and I started to work on xTeamWorks. I am not sure what is the best method of organizing all of this and I don't know how many people will actually be interested in reading all of this. Anyway, this will be few of several cross posts between two blogs, my normal blog and the xTeamWorks' blog.

There are several sources of information:

Source Forge Site

This site will contain the actual release files, product documentation and all product release information.

xTeamWorks' Blog

This is a journal of the project, how things are going, my ramblings, reflections, etc.

xTeamWorks' Wiki

This is used to actually manage the project. We will keep track of our XP stories, iterations, velocity and tasks.

The reason for all the different sites is that there are three different views of this project: the final product site, the management of the project and my personal accounts of the experience. This project is intended to serve multiple purposes:

work with XP in a remote setting

Bill and I don't use pure XP lately and I tend to work remotely on my current project. Since I must presented a paper at ADC 2003 about remote agile development, I wanted to explore a pure XP / pure virtual project. Though this is small, I think open source projects can benefit from remote XP.

build a tool to support online XP management

I work remotely a lot so posting 3x5 cards on a wall doesn't work for me. I did look at some other products for managing XP online, but they didn't quite address my needs or I couldn't get them to install correctly. So, like any good developer, I have convinced myself I can do a better job.... ;)

work more with Java and Eclipse

Bill and I have been mostly in Microsoft / .NET land for a while. I haven't done much Java work over the last year and haven't used Eclipse. This is a chance for us both to explore.

I am starting work, with the help of William Rakocy, on a web based collaboration tool for managing an XP project. I work remotely quite often so it would help to have online access to story cards to other project items. I have experimented with some wikis, MS Excel files and other techniques, but I think I could I could benefit from a tool.

I experimented with XPWeb and XPlanner, but wasn't particularly satisfied with them, at least for the needs of my project.

So, xTeamWorks will support the basic elements of XP, like story maintenance, task definition and signup, velocity tracking and iteration planning.

xteamworks.sourceforge.net is the website for the project. I will probably post updates as we go here.

If anyone has thoughts or requests, let me know.