As a part of my studies at the University of Hildesheim I took part in a lecture on Programming in Java. To finish this lecture we will have to write a program in groups of three people. Me and my coleagues decided to hand in an own proposal for a project, because the choice of available projects seemed to be rather poor. So our project will be building a Scrum project management tool.

The project - what is Scrum?
Scrum is an agile project management method that is continuously becoming popular among companies, especially those concerned with software development. I first read about this method when Acquia, the company of Drupal leader Dries Buytaert, announced that they had hired a Scrum expert for their project management. My next "experience" with Scrum was reading about it at a Project Management Blog, which also linked to a brilliant video (Scrum in under 10 minutes). If you want to learn more about Scrum watch this video! And finally Scrum is heavily based on the theoretical work of Nonaka, who is one of the most famous scientists in knowledge management and thus been a large part of my Bachelor thesis on "Knowledge Codification".

I then convinced two other students to join me and use this for the final project of our Java lecture. So we collected ideas, started writing a project specification and after solving some issues with the professor's team our project was accepted. Within the next weeks we are hopefully going to build a robust and useful application that assists project teams in applying Scrum to their projects.

Getting started
During first days of our project we did a lot of brainstorming, examined all the feature requests, planed the rough structure and key workflows of the program.

We also started to think about a suitable name and a corresponding logo. These are some logo proposals:

... and an image of the current process of building a graphical user interface (GUI):

... as well as a screenshot of our project management portal (Drupal, of course), where we exchange documents, discuss in a forum and so on:

What's coming up?
I hope to finish most of the GUI during this week. It is really demanding to realise good design in Java when you're used to building websites with HTML, CSS, jQuery and what have you. My personal opinion: Swing, Javas gui building API, is a dirty mess compared to webdesign posibilities. Even if you take into account all those nasty problems of cross-browser compatibility.

Furthermore, my colleagues are going to work on different data storage enginges (text files or Excel sheets) and the implementation of users with different permissions, managing multiple projects at once and other workflow-related things.

In the future we might probably also add other storage engines, such as a native Java database (HSQL) support. And I also thought about trying out Drupal as a server for Java applications. We are also planing to include some visualization of project's status.