PMango - Goals and Status

Project goals. PMango has its origins in several years of experience in teaching project management in software engineering courses at the Univerities of Padua and Florence. The first aim of the project was to made available to students and professors a project management application tailored for teaching purposes. This particular context defined the PMango requirements and resulted in its most characteristics features.

Classical PM tools. Work Breakdown Structure and Gantt Charts are supported by PMango since its first versions. CPM Activity Networks are planned to be included in the next major release.
Validation tools. Tools to check and validate a project plan against rules or models are implemented. The well-formedness of the WBS can be checked, identified errors and oddities are reported and can be used to improve the plan.
Effort distribution. The planned effort distribution is plotted and can be checked against models of effort distribution like the Rayleigh-Norden-Putnam one. Research on effort distribution models is part of the project and future results will be implemented in the application.
Workflow. People involved in a project use PMango to receive assignments according to the project plan. Progress of activities and effort spent by people is logged and made available to managers and supervisors for project control.
Performance evaluation. The actual effort distribution can be compared against the planned one. Data about effort and schedule are used to evaluate indicators of project performance with respect to time, effort and cost.
History analysis. The state of a project can be frozen and saved to compare plans and progress of activities at different stages in project life.
Project documentation. The application can produce customizable project reports as printable PDF documents.
User management. Users can be organized in groups and have access only to their own projects. Users can have different sets of capabilities to play different roles in projects, like managers, employees and supervisors.

Last but not least, PMango is open and open source. Being a research project, PMango is open to new directions in the development of tools to support project management. The software results of the research are distributed with an open source license: we are happy if people try PMango and give us feedbacks and suggestions.

Project status. The first released version of PMango was developed as an additional module of dotProject 1.0.2, an already available open source web application for project management. The additional module (which actually was named Vis1) provided versioning of project plans, functionalities to check the WBS well-formedness and to analyse the effort distribution.

In May 2006 PMango was released as an independent web application, formerly named Mango 2.0. The decision to develop a new application was due to several reasons. Mainly it was a consequence of the new access right mechanisms able to support groups and set of capabilities. In addition there were a request of a better integration of the Vis1 features and a general need of freedom in the use and modification of the core data structures of the application. PMango still has its roots in dotProject, but it is the result of an heavy reengineering of the software system. Considering the last release 2.2.0 release, basic libraries are mostly reused but, for the application code about 38% is reused from dotProject 2.0 as is, about 29% is modified and about 33% is completely new.

The current release, PMango 2.2.0 is an independent web application implemented with a L/WAMP (Linux/Windows + Apache + MySQL + PHP|Perl|Python) architecture, with PHP and Javascript for the top layer. The code of teh current release is stable since October 2007. PMango and is distributed under the open source GNU General Public License.

PMango is currently used by courses at the University of Pisa (Software Engineering Lab, BSc in Computer Science, Software Project Management Lab, MSc in Computer Science for the Enterprise), and at the University of Florence (Software Engineering Lab, MSc in Computer Science).

Project future. In the short term the project will be focused in improvement of application usability: more friendly user interface, context sensitive help, and so on. Introduction of CPM like task networks is under evaluation.

As a research goal, the project will investigate the convergence of several kinds of activity management applications: classical project planning tools, workflow engines, issue trakers and product repositories. The long term goal is to progressively introduce such features in PMango. For instance it will possible to define in the project plan "event driven" activities that are managed by an issue traker engine, without much effort on the part of the project leader. Or, for another perspective, by integrating in PMango a repository manager like CVS or Subversion, it will be possible to associate progress and completion of activities to the availability of products in the project repository.

Last, an objective of the project is to experiment the use of PMango outside the academic context. For instance in organizations that are in the way of introducing project management techniques (quite frequent in enterprises growing from very small to small), or in projects which need tutoring, remote consulting or supervision.