Rhythm is a Web-based issue and project tracking tool. It is the open source version of a tool originally developed by me (Moses Hohman) at Northwestern University's Center for Functional Genomics for project and issue tracking within our bioinformatics group. I rewrote Rhythm using Ruby on Rails in early 2006, but have since left NU and am no longer using the tool (see News below).
Rhythm aims to be:
- Simple: clean screen layout, UI controls take up a minimum of space, no "extra" features -- I will remove what isn't useful
- Configurable: you can add and remove features so you can use as little or as much of the functionality as you want.
- Whole project: tracks both planned new features and bugs
- Tailored for iterative software development: supports iterations and releases naturally
- Measurable: supports tracking metrics of your choice (although this hasn't been ported/built yet)
System requirements:
- Server side: Edge Rails and PostgreSQL or Oracle with the edge rails oracle adapter fixed (see this ticket)
- Client side: for now, the Firefox web browser; someday maybe IE and Safari, too
Rhythm is currently live and in active use at Northwestern, however it's missing functionality needed for those who want to start using it from scratch (stuff for setting up projects -- we have preexisting data so we don't need that functionality). Once those features are completed, I will release the bundle as version 0.9.
If you're curious to check out the code before the release, it's available from the subversion repository. However, be aware that the code there is still unfinished and not completely usable.
You can read more about the choices that went into Rhythm in this paper that I presented at the Agile 2005 conference.
News
- 2006-11-26: Admission: this project is lying fallow. I have left NU and am using Trac at my new job, and at NU they're more interested in Trac right now as well. I'm finding Trac to be not so good at tracking estimates/effort/velocity, so I am either thinking of contributing to Trac, evaluating another system (explainpmt or something), or if I suddenly find I have a lot of extra time, reviving this effort. If anyone is interested in me doing that, let me know. If I did that I would also clean up the current code base. It was my first Rails effort, and it's definitely imperfect. If someone's interested in the original ColdFusion code (which is even uglier, but more full-featured), just send me an email.
- 2006-03-16: Update: Rhythm is now live at NU. I swapped out the old version of the application last night. I'm looking forward to Rails 1.1 because edge rails currently has some bugs in the oracle adapter. Also, I've decided to call the first SourceForge release of Rhythm 0.9 rather than 1.0, and I'll call what's released at NU right now 0.8.
- 2006-03-07: Update: I have not had a lot of free time lately, but I am finally fixing the remaining issues for the 1.0 release. I have moved the subversion repository from TextDrive to SourceForge's new subversion service.
- 2006-01-02: Update: Over the last several weeks I have updated the code to Rails 1.0, and have been trying the app against our existing data in Oracle. This brought to light a number of performance issues that have taken a while to work through. In the process I've learned a number of things I didn't know about ActiveRecord. I'm now thinking a more realistic release date for 1.0 is Feburary 1.
- 2005-11-27: using ActiveRecord::Schema now instead of homegrown database-agnostic SQL generation tool; also, dabbling in plugins to extend Schema's SQL DSL, and for a different approach to logging changes to ActiveRecord model objects (
acts_as_change_tracked
) - 2005-11-11: upgraded to Rails 0.14.3 in Subversion
- 2005-11-10: improved this website, opened up Subversion repository (since moved to SourceForge's subversion service)for anonymous access.