Time to Mingle?
Posted on September 3, 2007
Filed Under development, ruby | Leave a Comment
I recently saw a demo of the Thoughtworks product to manage Agile IT projects called Mingle. I must admit that it did look quite impressive and fills a very large gap in the agile project management tool market. I have been road testing a number of products in this space for some time now, more specifically Scrum Agile Projects, and they are either too big, too complex, too expensive or just plain wrong. Mingle looks okay and I hope they keeps things simple.
The reason I think they probably will keep things simple is because they have done a couple of really smart things. Firstly, they have provided its customers with a extensible tool to gather, customise and information radiate key agile project metrics in a variety of different ways. Really neat. Secondly, they have built Mingle using JRuby, thereby harnessing the full power of the Java platform using the expressive nature of the Ruby programming language. Thirdly, deployment is simply a jar file, remember its JRuby.
What I don’t like about Mingle is its pricing model. I think it’s a mistake to charge a massive $59 per per project member. That’s a bit on the expensive side. I’m sure deals will be made by customers approaching ThoughtWorks Studio directly but this should not be the way. Why not charge per project? When you run an agile project there are so many people, with a periphery interest in the project, who you just couldn’t afford to fork out $59 for a Mingle license for. And in that respect, I find the Mingle licensing exclusive. Sorry chickens, you can’t Mingle with the pigs, it’s just too expensive is not the right message to send. Hopefully, someone will figure that out sooner rather than later…
Comments
Leave a Reply
