PMango - People and Milestones

PMango is an open source project. Actually it has no funding, so it is carried out in the developers spare time with the valuable help of computer science students working for their theses.

The project is hosted by Sourceforge for what concerns the software issues (this web site, the Subversion repository, the trackers, ...) and by Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa for the hardware facilities (room, desk, chair, ...). The server that runs PMango for teaching and demo purposes is hosted by Polo Fibonacci Computer Facilities.

The project name, PMango, stands for Project Manager, being mango the jargon term for the person who in a project has management duties. For your curiosity, the other roles with a jargon term are doco, for people involved in project documentation, and devo, for the technological gurus.
In the PMango logo, the little dot is a reference to dotProject, from which PMango forked.
Someone pointed out that "PMango" sounds like Eega Beeva speech. Well, we like it.

People

Giovanni A. Cignoni: founder, leader (!) and manager (!!) of the project; he started PMango in early 2004 after several years of experience in teaching project management in software engineering courses at the Universities of Padua and of Florence.

Marco Bonacchi: developed the very first version of PMango (actually named ManGo!) as an additional module of dotProject while working for his "Laurea Magistrale" degree thesis (MSc, University of Florence).

Lorenzo Ballini: is the main developer of the first stable version of PMango as a standalone application (actually named Mango 2.0) that, still rooted in dotProject, is an heavy reengineering of the whole system; he started working at PMango for his "Laurea Magistrale" degree thesis (MSc, University of Florence).

Riccardo Nicolini: started working at PMango for his "Laurea" degree thesis (BSc, University of Pisa), he is working on generation of printable reports.

The Sw4Us students (Marco Trevisan, Andrea Stagi, Andrea Toccafondi, Francesco Purpura, Matteo Pratesi): they participated to the 2009/10 course of Programming Tecniques and won the context for the Gantt/WBS/TaskNetwork diagrams extension to PMango. Their work is now part of release 2.6.

Paolo Vedele: started working at PMango for his "Laurea" degree thesis (BSc, University of Pisa), he is working on planned/actual effort profile diagrams.

Contributes and acknowledgements

PMango is the result of several years of experience in teaching project management in software engineering courses: from 1998/99 to 2002/03 at the University of Padua and from 2000/01 to 2005/06 then from 2009/10 since today at the University of Florence. Many discussions with Renato Conte and Tullio Vardanega (both of University of Padua) are at the base of PMango.

Students were involved in preliminar investigations and worked on project management issues during their thesis: Monja Da Riva (BSc, University of Padua), Vincenzo Esposito Ziello (BSc, University of Florence). Gabriele Giovannetti (MSc, University of Pisa) worked on the effort profiles which are today a feature of PMango.

Two other groups of students were involved in the 2009/10 course of Programming Tecniques: Amalga (Andrea Margheri, Andrea Caporale, Alessandro Pescini, Giacomo Falsini, Luca Curcio, Matteo Landi) and Kiwi (Marco Tinacci, Francesco Calabri, Manuele Paolantonio, Daniele Poggi, Massimo Nocentini, Niccolò Rogai). While not winners, they contributed to raise the quality of the results.

Dario Besseghini and Samuele Tognini manage the installation of PMango at the Polo Fibonacci Computer Facilities.

Vincenzo Ambriola adopted PMango for his Software Engineering course at the University of Pisa and was involved in many discussions about the requirements of the tool. He sponsored the use in other related courses and can be thankfully considered a sort of godparent of the project.

Vincenzo Macrì adopted PMango for his Projecy Management course at the University of Pisa and is a valuable source of feedbacks and suggestions for the tool and the future of the project.

Finally, a big thank goes to the users, mainly students, which used the various versions of PMango in their projects.

Project milestones

October 13, 2010, first beta of PMango 2.6 (BigEffort) is installed at pmango.cli.di.unipi.it and released. It is the result of the work of Paolo Vedele plus the features introduced by the Sw4Us student group. It will be used by the students of the IS course, as a project management tool and as the baseline for the development due as teaching assignment.

February 10, 2010, TP teaching assignments completed. The Sw4Us group of students wins the contest. The PMango 2.5 (TPNightmare) release will however be delayed to fix some bugs.

October 05, 2009, for the first time the students attending the TP course will be developers, as well as users of PMango: for their teaching assignment they will implement Gantt/WBS/TaskNetwork diagrams.

February 04, 2008, PMango 2.2.0 (DocoRik) released , ready for another tour of duty with courses at UniFi and UniPi.

October 12, 2007, Riccardo Nicolini receives his Laurea (Bsc) degree discussing his work on PDF reports for PMango.

May 2007, second paper about PMango presented at the 2007 edition of the Didamatica.

December 15, 2006, first fix received by an user, by Sirhan, from Malaysia. Thanks Sirhan!

November, 2006, project moves from the restricted use in Academia to the Open Source community, it will be hosted on Sourceforge, the definitive name of the project changes in PMango.

October, 2006, Riccardo Nicolini joins the project. He will work on PMango for his Computer Science thesis (University of Pisa, BSc), developing support to printable reports.

July 6, 2006, Lorenzo Ballini receives his Laurea degree discussing his thesis about Mango 2.0.

May 2006, Mango 2.0 (FirstOne) released after succesfully pass the beta testing by students.

February 2006, Mango 2.0 beta installed at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa; students use it in courses at the University of Florence.

October 2005, first paper about PMango presented at the 2005 edition of the AICA national conference.

June 2005, Lorenzo Ballini joins the project. He will work on PMango for his Computer Science thesis (University of Florence, MSc). One of the first results of his work is the decision to build an independent application.

April 19, 2005, Marco Bonacchi receives his Laurea degree discussing his thesis about Vis1.

February 2005, Vis1 plus a number of usage rules for dotProject 1.0.2 defines the ManGo! environment for project management. ManGo! starts to be used by students in courses at the University of Florence and at the University of Pisa.

January 2005, Vis1 is released as additional module of dotProject, it adds versioning of project plans, well-formedness checks on the project WBS and evaluation of effort distribution against effort models.

Early 2004, Marco Bonacchi starts working on his Computer Science thesis (University of Florence, MSc), with the goal of implementing a project management tool for students. This is the actual start of the PMango project.

Around 2003, theses by Gabriele Giovannetti (University of Pisa, MSc), Vincenzo Esposito Ziello (University of Florence, BSc), Monja Da Riva (University of Padua, BSc) investigated management issues in projects carried out by students.

Before 2003, experiences in teaching software engineering (1998-2003 at the University of Padua, since 2001 at the University of Florence) originated the idea of a tool designed to support students carring out software projects in their courses.