Mingle - an Agile Project Management Tool

Mingle approaches project management in a visual way creating cards for actions that can be pulled over “lanes” of activities within “card walls”.  For example you might have a Development card wall that has cards (tickets) that have three “lanes” – Ready for Development, Development in Progress, and Ready for QA.   As the ticket is ready for each phase, you can drag and drop it to the appropriate area for actions.  Each card can be expanded to a full window allowing you to edit and make changes. 

Each project will allow you to set basic settings, project variables, and set up a repository where the project will live.

The site describes Mingle as:

Mingle, the agile project management tool, helps software teams deliver quickly. It gets your team members on the same page. Give management real-time visibility into project status.

It goes on to describe the software as:

… provides a shared workspace for your entire team. It adapts to the way agile project teams think and work, while supporting various flavours of Agile like XP, Scrum, Agile Hybrid.

You can evaluate Mingle for five persons for a year for free.  The steps are:

1. Download the software package – I’m using a Mac, so these instructions match the experience in OSX
2. Unpack the archive
3. Click twice on icon on desktop
4. Should open a little control panel
5. Click Open Browser after it un-greys
6. It will open an installation Wizard
7. Click next
8. I then fired up MAMP and created a MySQL database called mingle.  I then created a user called mingle with all privs.
9. Back over in my browser I changed the database to MySQL and filled in all the blanks CHANGING the database port 8889 – the port the MAMP uses by default for MySQL
10. In the next step, you simply click “set up database” be patient.  It takes a little while for everything to set up correctly.
11. I skipped the next step as I’m simply evaluating the software on my localhost
12. Accept the license
13. Add a sign in name, display name, an email address, and a password and click “set up this account”
14. Finally, Import templates – at this point you will see that you need to enter your license key.  It should have been emailed to you when you downloaded the software.  There is a “Register Mingle” link over to the right.  Go to your email, and grab your key.  Enter your key.  The license is good for one year. Click “done”

At this point you have a fully functioning copy of Mingle on your localhost ready for you to start experimenting with.

Hi Matthew--

I hadn't heard of Mingle before and I'm looking for a simple project management solution so your post caught my eye. How are you finding Mingle so far? Am I correct in thinking that it takes some substantial database know-how in order to set it up. Or would this be fairly straightforward to use?

Hi Megan,

Setting up a copy to evaluate is easy.  Setting up a full blown instance requires understanding how to set up Apache Tomcat - something best left to Systems Admins.

Best,

Matthew.