Back to index cards

Over a range of projects that have been based around user stories, I have seen a number of different means of story management, including XPlanner, Mingle, spreadsheets, Pivotal Tracker and index cards. Each of these has good and bad points (some more than others), but I've come to regard index cards blue-tack'ed to the wall as the simplest and best option.

The major factor is visibility: regardless of what lanes you use, it is close to instant to view where each story is at and who is working on what. Compare this with logging onto your web-based story management tool (you remember your password/have enough licenses don't you?), selecting the right project, applying a few filters, removing the lanes you aren't interested in and hopefully getting a view of the current iteration.

Of course, you still might want to use a tool for history, backups or to share across team sites. I know of one rambunctious manager who likes to wander around project rooms silently removing random cards from stories walls, just to see what would happen!

Git toolbag

Here are a couple of helpful git tools that I seem to use most days...

• bedazzle your bash prompt with git info
  
• git_remote_branch - hide away those curly remote branch commands
• git ready - great git tips well explained
  

Cherry pickins with git

Git came to my rescue very nicely today by allowing me to replay history a bit. Earlier in the day I had to revert a commit because I got interrupted half way through getting the new changes working on our build server. By the time I got around to having a second attempt, the repository had moved on a number of commits. So I wanted to reverse the revert, but was nervous about losing any of the later changes.

After a few branch-merge and branch-rebase attempts in different directions, a colleague suggested git cherry-pick. Using gitx, I grabbed the sha of the commit that I wanted to re-apply and ran git cherry-pick <sha-to-reapply> (on a new branch from master). This created a new commit as a descendant of HEAD, with exactly the changes I wanted re-applied. It even re-applied the commit message (although next time I'll use the -x option to flag the commit as a cherry pick - should have read the man page a bit closer).

Not only was cherry-pick the right tool, but git allowed me to very quickly branch, merge and rebase any number of times until I found the best way to do the job. Nice.