Agile my Basecamp

Basecamp is a great tool for project management and we use it extensively. One of its tools is the ability to specify tasks (called 'to dos') and order them into lists. Although you can set a 'required by' date for a task, what it is missing is the ability to assign an effort value to those tasks and then provide the sum total effort of all tasks in a list. If you are on an agile team, then knowing the relative size of a task and the sum total of a group of tasks helps when planning the work to be performed in an upcoming iteration (sprint) or the total effort remaining in a backlog of tasks.

At Deeson Group, we thought it would be a good idea to have this functionality, so we added it via a custom script for the Firefox Greasemonkey plugin.

In Basecamp, we now add the effort that each task will take, as a number in square brackets, somewhere in the task.

Then, if you have our script enabled, when you view the list you'll see the following. See how the iteration and the list title now have the total number of hours added after in brackets.

Installation instructions

You need to be running Firefox with the Greasemonkey addon.

Then install the script file by going here and clicking install: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/104874.