Until recently, most ThoughtWorks project managers kept track of the life of the project using Excel spreadsheets, with ever increasingly sophisticated templates. But recently that has changed because of one thing: Mingle. Mingle is an agile project tracking tool that distills much of the experience ThoughtWorks has garnered from years of agile project management into our first commercial tool.

Come see what makes Mingle different from the already crowded marketplace of project tracking tools. It does this with some innovative ideas, like smart Wiki-based templates, a virtual, sortable card wall, and innovative use of categorization, tags, and properties. Mingle is designed to accommodate not just the project manager but all members of the project, allowing customizable views for each project role.

This session covers how to set up projects in Mingle, how to track stories, how to manage the virtual card wall (including grouping, sorting, tagging, etc). It also discusses how to create custom workflow transitions and other common project management chores. But seeing Mingle work is just part of the story. This session also delves into some of the high-level design decisions that make Mingle possible, including details of how Mingle was developed (in Ruby on Rails) and deployed (the first commercial application deployed via JRuby). Come see both the "why" and the "how" of Mingle.