I’ve got quite a bit of feedback on Silver Catalyst, where it rocks and where it could improve. For instance, Prakash says he loves the easy install and user interface but says that he would like the ability to split user stories into tasks. That is one of the features coming up in version 2.0. There are a number of other features that are being planned for Silver Catalyst 2.0,  and I’ll be posting to this blog with more about Silver Catalyst 2.0 over the next few weeks.

Just like with version 1.0, as development progresses, pre-release versions will be made available. If you would like to get an invite to download the pre-release versions, head over to the home page and sign up for pre-release updates.

Also, since Silver Catalyst 2.0 is around the corner, any licenses purchased for the current version will be upgraded to Silver Catalyst 2.0 free of cost. In fact, since there will be a price revision after the major version release it probably makes sense to purchase licenses beforehand and then upgrade them.

For more news on Silver Catalyst 2.0, keep watching this blog and sign up for pre-release updates.

Update: This offer is now closed. Many thanks to all those who provided feedback. I hope you find the fifty user license useful

If you’ve been following this blog, you would have known that Silver Catalyst v1.5 was released a few days ago. You would also have known that the free version of Silver Catalyst comes with a three team member license. This is perfect for use with small teams and for evaluation purposes.

But wouldn’t it be cool to use the tool on a real project with the actual team? I know a lot of people would love that.

So I’m doing an experiment. Till the end of this month, I’m giving away a free upgrade of the trial license than can be used by fifty team members. This will probably cover your entire team, so you can use it on a real, live project. It is a license with no time limits and no feature limits. The only thing is that it’s still a trial license so it won’t be eligible for ‘official’ support. Not that it matters, because you can shoot me an email anytime nevertheless.

How do you get this upgraded license?

Download the latest version of Silver Catalyst, use it and then review it on your blog with a link back to the Silver Catalyst homepage. The latest version of Silver Catalyst is 1.5.1 released today (October 15), so if you’ve got an older version, you might want to download the latest one. There are no conditions on the review. It can be positive, negative, whatever. Just keep it unbiased and write what you really think about Silver Catalyst.

Then email me at siddharta@silverstripesoftware.com with the URL of your blog post and I’ll reply with the upgraded license.

Sounds simple? It is. I’m looking forward to reading the reviews!

Just released Silver Catalyst v1.5 (check out the new homepage). So, whats new in this version? The biggest feature addition is the ability to embed external web pages on the dashboard page. You can now take the build status or acceptance test rate graphs from another application and display them in the Silver Catalyst dashboard. Take a look at this screenshot which shows the build status from the continuous integration tool embedded in the dashboard (click to view full screen):

Pretty cool, no?  Imagine being able to monitor the status of all the critical tools in one place. Thats what this feature allows you to do. So what are you waiting for? Go and download version 1.5 now!

It’s been just three weeks since the previous release. Frequent releases — thats the agile way So what are you waiting for? Get it from the download page.

A new version of Silver Catalyst has been released. The latest version is now v1.3. Get the latest release from the download page. A free 3 team member version is available from the download page, while paid members can upgrade their installation of Silver Catalyst to this version for free.

The main feature addition is this version is support for CSV import and export. Most popular spreadsheet programs allow you to save and load data in this format, so the new feature allows you to import your spreadsheet data into Silver Catalyst, or export project data into the spreadsheet. This feature is especially useful if you are currently using a spreadsheet to manage your agile project and you want to move the data over to Silver Catalyst.

To import data from Microsoft Excel, create a spreadsheet with a column containing task descriptions, and optionally, the priority, person assigned to, estimate, status and notes. Save this file in the Unicode Text format and upload the saved file through the CSV Import/Export plugin (Click the Excel icon next to the project name). If you use OpenOffice Calc you will need to save the data in Text CSV format.

Version 1.3 also contains a number of UI enhancements. The status update area has been made more prominent and there is more feedback when submitting forms and editing tasks.

Check it out. Download Silver Catalyst v1.3 and see how you like the new enhancements.

I’ve said before that more than practices or techniques, agile is often about a mindset. It is about understanding the values and principles behind the practices that really enable you to be ‘agile’.

I often discuss Silver Catalyst with managers who are interested in an agile tool, and often there are some feature requests. Some feature requests are holes in the functionality of the tool and these are carefully noted down and scheduled for a future release. Some features, however, stem from bringing in a traditional mindset to an agile project.

The agile mindset

For example, in Silver Catalyst, any team member who is a part of a project can edit a task. I’m often asked why Silver Catalyst does not have a fine grained authorisation system when each individual can only edit their own tasks.

This kind of thinking is common among traditional managers who have moved into agile. In their old process, it would be the responsibility of the project manager to create, schedule and estimate tasks, and the team members would do their work and update their tasks. So this is the model that they are used to.

In an agile process, it is the team members themselves who take responsibility for the tasks. They create and schedule and estimate the tasks. As they perform work, the team as a unit updates the tasks. The team works together. Agile processes change the individual-centric view, replacing it with a team-centric view. The team is a single unit.

Let us say someone is ill and takes a day off. In an agile team, someone else might well step in and complete the task. In such a scenario, it makes sense for the other team member to edit the task that was assigned to the original team member. But you can’t do that if you have a system where team members can only edit their own tasks. The team as a unit is a powerful concept, and a core concept of agile.

Talking through the tool

Another feature request that is often asked is for what I call “talking through the tool.” For example asking team members to enter a reason when a task estimate is changed so that the project manager can view it later.

Agile processes encourage communication between all the team members and stakeholders. A scrum project provides two avenues for such interaction — the daily standup meeting and the iteration retrospective. Most agile projects have equivalents. If something unexpected happens, a team member can bring it up at these points. So agile processes already have techniques in place where problems can be brought up and discussed.

Therefore adding such a feature to a tool encourages teams to “communicate through the tool” rather than communicating directly, which in turn reduces the quality of communication.

Tracking and controlling

I’ve said it before — an agile tool is a communication tool, not a tracking and controlling tool. This is critical. What Silver Catalyst aims to do is to improve visibility and communication among distributed teams and stakeholders. Managers sometimes ask me about features through which they can control the team — the individual history of a particular team member for example. It is really important for the success of an agile project that the team be allowed to self organise. Micro-tracking of the project by the project manager can often be counter productive.

Silver Catalyst

As far as Silver Catalyst is concerned, I am pretty clear that the tool is there to support the team and process. Unlike traditional processes where the tool is front and center and in many ways the enforcer of the process, in agile processes the team is the core, supported by the process and the tool. Thats the role that Silver Catalyst is designed to fill.

Scoble calls Django the hot new development framework. Not sure about the new part. It’s been around for a few years. But definitely hot. When I first started working on Silver Catalyst, I wondered whether it was the right decision to build it in Python and Django. It doesn’t trouble me anymore.

What I really like is all the supporting goodies that come with working in Python. Topping the list are the really cool utilities like cx_freeze that allow me to integrate a web server, database (sqlite3), django and my application into one executable, and allow me to deploy django apps on the desktop.

Other factors: I really like the language for one (obviously this is a big factor ). Amazing libraries for another. For instance, the code to generate PDF reports was all handled by reportlab. Generate charts with PIL. There are just so many kick ass libraries.

There are some gotchas though. One is working with Unicode. The Django development trunk was broken when it came to handling Unicode. There was a lot of work being done on a Unicode Branch. I spent a lot of time merging code from this branch in order to get the Unicode update of Silver Catalyst done.

Good news for all those who are just starting out: This branch was merged into trunk a few days ago, so start with the latest svn revision. For the rest of us, we’ll need to update our workspaces.

If you visited the Silver Catalyst download page in the last day you would have noticed that a new version of Silver Catalyst is now available. Silver Catalyst v1.2 has been released. As posted earlier, this version introduces wiki integration (Not sure what a wiki is? Click here). What this means is that if you have an existing wiki, you can integrate Silver Catalyst with it. If you don’t use a wiki already, choose from one of the various wikis available and set it up. See here and here for a list of available wiki software and a comparison between them.

Why integrate with a wiki? Many agile teams use a wiki to manage information and documentation about the project. It is common practice to create a wiki page for each feature and put any documentation about the project, acceptance test cases and other files relating to that feature on that wiki page. Apart from that, you would also put project documentation, design documentation, screenshots, diagrams on the wiki. A wiki is an easily editable, lightweight information management system that is popular with agile teams.

That’s why it is important that the project management tool integrates with a wiki. By clicking a task, you should be able to go straight to the wiki page for that task and view the requirements, tests and other documentation. That is exactly what this new version of Silver Catalyst allows you to do.

To setup the wiki integration, you need to enter the URL format string. This is a string like http://10.10.10.10/wiki/%p/%T. For each task, Silver Catalyst will replace the parameters %p (project name) and %T (task name with space converted to underscore) with the actual values and display a link next to the task. There are some more parameter patterns available, so you can generate the kind of URL you want. Clicking this link takes you to the corresponding page on the wiki.

The advantage of this method is

• It is compatible with any wiki. In fact any web app that uses different URLs for different features can be integrated into Silver Catalyst using this method
• It allows you to use the wiki that you are comfortable with. Want a simple wiki? Powerful wiki? Python wiki? Java wiki? It’s your choice.
• External wikis are generally more feature rich and powerful compared to wikis that are inbuilt into project management tools

You can get this version of Silver Catalyst from the download page.

Silver Catalyst v1.2 is coming up. This version brings an all new feature — wiki integration. If you have an existing wiki installed (many agile teams do), then you can automatically link up each feature in Silver Catalyst with its own page on the wiki.

Unlike other project management tools, I’ve decided to integrate with an existing external wiki rather than provide an inbuilt wiki. Why? Here are some reasons

• Many teams already have a wiki. It doesn’t make sense to ask them to abandon the tool that they are already comfortable with.
• Existing wikis are extremely feature rich, and are functionally better than inbuilt wikis.
• Why reinvent the wheel?

Having said that, there are also teams that don’t use a wiki. For these teams, it may be a hassle to setup and manage an external wiki. I’ll be packaging a pre-integrated version of Moin Moin so that these teams can get productive straight away. That won’t be a part of this release though, but stay tuned for it in the near future.

I chose Moin Moin because it is an excellent functional wiki with nice extensibility. Plus it is written in Python and that makes integration with Silver Catalyst a lot easier (Silver Catalyst is also written in Python).

Interestingly, the wiki integration feature was created using the plugin system. For those who are unaware about it, Silver Catalyst has a plugin system that allows you to create such integrations and extensions and plug it into the tool. The beauty of this system is that it allows anyone to write plugins and extend the tool. The exact mechanism of writing a plugin is a bit complicated and undocumented at this time, but I hope to polish it and open up the plugin APIs a month or two down the line.

[Update]: I was just re-reading this and I spotted one area of potential confusion. Moin Moin is licensed under the GPL, so what does pre-integrating mean and does it mean we have to release the source of Silver Catalyst? In this case pre-integrating just means that you will be able to run it using the same server that runs Silver Catalyst (the server will be pre-configured to allow running CGI applications).

Moin Moin will be in source form. Since we will not be using any Moin Moin code in Silver Catalyst, I think that it is okay to give Moin Moin as source and Silver Catalyst as binary. I’d love to be confirmed on this point though. If anyone has more information, that would be welcome.

Some good news. A new version of Silver Catalyst has been released. It’s been exactly a month since the first version was released. As mentioned in my previous post, the new version allows you to enter data in multiple scripts (of course, you need to have the relevant fonts installed on your system).

Here is an example screenshot

You can download the new version from the download page. Follow the upgrade instructions on that page to upgrade your version of Silver Catalyst.