Introducing the XTrack Application This and subsequent exercises will be based on a simple but useful XP tracking application named XTrack. XTrack is a Web application that allows our XP team to maintain information about projects, such as their iterations, stories, tasks, and tests, in a central online repository available to all project stakeholders. This application serves several objectives: The project's tracker has a simple way to maintain information about a project, such as estimated and actual time to complete stories, who owns which tasks, and which stories are assigned to each iteration. These data and metrics are available to all interested stakeholders online. For example, if an upper-level manager of the business wants to know how the current iteration is progressing, he can log into XTrack and see. Teams split across various locations can track tasks, stories, and iterations for a project. Using index cards or some other offline means of documenting these artifacts won't work if team members aren't all located in the same place. It maintains historical information about each project. For example, the team can look back during a retrospective and see whether they're getting better at accurately estimating stories. Figure 8.1 is a screen shot from the XTrack system, showing some early versions of the stories written when the system was being developed. Figure 8.1. XTrack stories You can access an instance of the XTrack system at http://xptester.org/xtrack Story: User can create, read, and update a story via a Web interface. The data fields in a story are number, name, author, description, estimate, iteration, timestamps, and state. |
1. | Given the above XTrack story, use the process we describe in this chapter to find hidden assumptions. | 2. | Identify the questions related to these assumptions that you'd ask in discussion. | |