Today I spent the day on Capitol Hill, presenting the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation to the 12th Annual Tech Exhibition of the Congressional Internet Caucus. OSDV is a non-profit foundation working to build open source solutions for voter and election management, as a way to increase the transparency of elections, restore confidence in the vote, and reduce the cost to states and counties to implement such systems.
The application we were showing was one we've been developing with them for the past 8 weeks, an online voter registration tracking system, called Reggie. It's designed to help eligible voters to register to vote, and to track their registration process; and to give registrars greater oversight and auditability.
By applying agile methods and leveraging Ruby on Rails, we were able to deliver a fully test-driven alpha product in just 8 weeks from the initial scoping meeting, during the holiday season, with a single pair of developers.
OSDV has had serious interest from a number of State Secretaries and registrars, and hopes to pilot with at least one state in the coming months.
Pivotal-developed projects like this one, Peer to Patent, and Casebook apply modern web technologies to improve the efficiency and transparency of government. We're proud to work on projects like this one, and to be an agent for change.
Matthais Marschall at AgileWebOperations.com posted an interesting article the other day comparing Pivotal Tracker to Thoughtworks Mingle. He recognizes that the two tools have a very different philosophy when it comes to configurability: Mingle supports a huge number of different configuration options, whereas Tracker is intentionally very simple and more prescriptive about process. His take is that the simplicity of Tracker is fact a good thing. He likes Tracker's backlog management, its simple UI, and the way that the tool fits naturally into the agile process:
Where Mingle is more like an assistant, whom you can tell to put a card on the wall or give you this or that report, Tracker is more like an agile coach, making sure all the administrative tasks like iteration tracking are "simply there".
Chris's recent post called The Tracker Story points out that simplicity and ease-of-use has always been one of Tracker's core design principles:
Tracker embraces simplicity. It should make managing projects easy, rather than make its users slaves to maintaining the plan. It should give every user of the system more information back than they put in. Tracker doesn't have a huge list of features, because it tries to stay true to its core purpose.
Thanks for the post, Matthais, and we're glad you're finding Tracker to be a good fit for your development process.