Iguana

Iguana is an open source issue management system with a kanban board, sprint planning
and time logging features, and anything else you need to make working on a project in groups pleasant.

You can get in on github.

Table of contents

TL;DR

In contrast to other state-of-the-art ticket systems, iguana has a strong focus on easily usable basic functions to help you planing the next schedule and have always a nice overview about your current tasks depending on your needs. There is a kanban board to keep an eye on the progress until the end of the next planning stage and also a backlog to have the ability for scheduling of long-terms. In combination with a mechanism to log time spent on different tasks individually those are the essential functionalities.

Terms

To clarify this description some terms that we use shall be explained here.

Project

A project is the construct that encapsulates all metainformation of a particular project.
  • Who is member of a project? Members are distinguished between managers and developers having different permissions.
  • Which issues are assigned to this project?
  • Which member has worked how much time on a project in total?
  • Which categories/tags does this project have?

Issue

An issue is always a part of a specific project and describes which tasks have to be, or already have been, done.
  • Which developer is working on an issue?
  • What kind of issue is it - either a bug, a task, or a story?
  • When is the deadline of an issue?
  • Which priority does this issue have?
  • In which category/tag does this fit into?
  • How much time has who worked on this issue so far?
Issues that are done and belong to older sprints are automatically archived and can be listed through the archive.

Sprintboard

Within the sprintboard, that is basically a kanban board, you have an overview about the current sprint, which is the scheduling-entity. Each of those columns here represents a different progress-state of the assigned issues to see how much planned work has been completed or has not been started yet, visually accentuated by a progress bar.

Backlog

To keep an eye on long-term scheduling the backlog provides the possibility to create issues that should be done, but not necessarily within the current sprint. Also you can easily move issues from the backlog to a current or future sprint and vice versa.

Features

The content behind this listing might become the reason for you to use iguana. :)

Olea-Bar

The One Line Edit Add-Bar is the tool you probably love the most about iguana, because it faciliates you to create and edit existing issues via comandline from both the sprintboard and backlog for the most comfortable way of adjustment. Therefore we wrote our own lexer and parser to handle our own language. For examples see the demonstration-section below.

Time-logging

To log the time you worked on a specific issue there exists multiple ways and you can use whichever you prefer. You can start either from the detail-view of an issue, from the general time-log-overview, or by the punch in and punch out buttons, that automatically add the elapsed time between those button-hits to the amount of your logged time. Another way of logging time is using the Olea-Bar.

Activity stream

To stay up to date the latest actions on issues you are involved in appear on the start page and also in your personal profile page.

Activity

This is the topic that summarises the two previous sections with the possibility to visualise them in different charts to be able to see the trend of progress within a specific project.

Integrations

Currently we support git, the free and open source version control system, and slack, an instant messaging services to simplify your workflow, and there are plans for additional integrations.
TODO - add proper instructions for git and slack integrations.

REST-API

TODO

Markdown support

TODO

Limitations

As stated out previously, iguana focuses on the basic tools one need to manage a project with multiple developers. This means the hierarchy in general is flat and there are neither subtasks nor subprojects, but they are all on the same level. Even though the hierarchy is flat there is the possibility to create some dependencies between different tasks and theoretically the same applies for projects for example by choosing a unique preposition to sort projects by groups. But in case you really need sub-{issues,projects} iguana might not be the best tool for you.
The same holds for complex state-nexuses. Iguana does not provide the possibility to specify that an issue has to be in a state X before it can be transferred into a state Y, but there is a visual feedback for issues being still open from which a specific issue depends on. The idea is to give some good hints about what to do without the regulation on how to use Iguana.

Demonstration

The demonstration section is separated from this page to avoid a confusing bunch of information. If you want to jump directly to a specific section see the navigation above.

Known issues

Plan of the future

Questions and answers

Thanks

Our special thanks go to Florian Harbecke who was part of our team for about one month and especially to Philipp Klein for the initial guidance and the introduction to web development.