April 22, 2009

Announcing basecampreporting and django-baseboard

At work, we use Base­camp, a lot.

We use it for design projects, devel­op­ment projects, and projects that have no design or devel­op­ment com­po­nents whatsoever.

Our project teams like Base­camp because of its focus on com­mu­ni­ca­tion, but we’ve found that it lacks a really good rollup or dash­board functionality.

I’d like to have a dash­board show­ing the progress of just my group’s projects, mar­ket­ing would want the same, etc.

For a while, our groups have all been man­u­ally updat­ing pages on our inter­nal wiki to get that functionality.

I’m a lazy, dumb pro­gram­mer, so I imme­di­ately thought why not auto­mate this sort of thing.

Thanks to the Base­camp API and the Python wrap­per I was able to whip up the base­cam­pre­port­ing pack­age.

It’s still very early, and it was writ­ten on nights and week­ends (hence the open-​sourcing of it), so be kind when you look at the code.

It pro­vides a higher-​level wrap­per around the Base­camp API and injects some Scrum con­cepts onto projects like sprints and backlogs.

For exam­ple, a sprint is just a todo list that con­tains the word “Sprint #{integer}” in it. It can guess that the cur­rent sprint is the sprint with the lowest inte­ger that still has unchecked items on it.

The next log­i­cal step was to build a Django-​powered Web appli­ca­tion that used this library to dis­play sum­mary infor­ma­tion on projects and allowed folks to tag and orga­nize the projects into var­i­ous dashboards.

Thus was born django-​baseboard, which is even greener and rawer than base­cam­pre­port­ing. It’s name comes from it’s role as Base(camp driven dash)boards.

I have to give a big thanks to Jacob Kaplan-​Moss for his writeup on Django and build­out as I never would have turned these into prop­erly pack­aged appli­ca­tions with­out it!

Filed under: BasecampReporting,Management,Programming,Python

Next:
Previous:

Related