VIAProMa: An Agile Project Management Framework for Mixed Reality

Abstract

With the COVID-19 pandemic, distributed and remote working became a necessity but in agile project management, social interactions like daily standup meetings in Scrum are vital for the project success. Mixed reality can provide a new way of combining remote collaboration with innovative 3D visualizations to analyze the project status. In this paper, we present a visual immersive analytics framework for project management (VIAProMa). It imports data from project management tools like the GitHub issue tracker for open-source projects. With these task data as the basis, it can generate three-dimensional visualizations, e.g. about the overall progress or the competences of individual developers. Developers, stakeholders and end users can meet in the collaborative virtual environment as avatars and establish a spatial structure with the task cards and visualizations. Therefore, VIAProMa with its adapted and customized mixed reality project management features supports both the shared meetings and the information flow in the project. The shared environment makes it a suitable tool for DevOpsUseXR, an extension to the DevOps workflow, where end users are able to participate in the development process in mixed reality. The resulting implementation is available as an open-source project with cross-platform capabilities targeting the Microsoft HoloLens, HTC VIVE and Android smartphones, as well as tablets. The framework is applied in university teaching classes to convey agile methodology in mixed reality programming practices.