Mizura project is launched

After more than a year of research, sleepless nights and a lot of code testing, the project Mizura was lauched.

Like any open source project, it depends of personal efforts to be done and so, this weekend, I dedicated some hours to it.

It was created an Jira to control the project development, a space in Confluence to organize documents, a discussion group to allow people interact with ideas and this blog to publish relevant news.

Motivation

The project Mizura came from a daily affliction of our development teams and project management areas: the integration between software management tools (in this case, the Atlassian Jira) and the modeling and project tools (in this case, Sparxsystems Enterprise Architect).

So, I have been working since 2008 with the idea of integrating these softwares, allowing project managers to visualize usecases and requirements as manageable artifacts, while our systems analysts, architects, developers and users can track these same elements as project issues.

Thus the Mizura idea appeared, allowing a unified, transparent and bidirectional interaction between these greatest tools.

Architecture

Basically, the Mizura is composed by 5 parts:

• EA Connector, which allows read, extract and update information in UML diagrams.
• Jira Connector, which allows read, extract and update issues and other project information.
• Spreadsheet Connector, which transforms and integrates UML elements and issues into lines in the spreadsheets, making easly tabulation of data and estimatives.
• Mapper, which defines the mappings between connectors, allowing things like "an issue is mapped to a usecase" or "an issue link is mapped to a requirement dependency".
• MDA Connector, which enables the visual definition of the Jira's workflows using default diagrams in the Enterprise Architect.

Current status and future works

Today (January 2010), the project Mizura was lauched to the public audience, where we are looking for developers and partners to implement the basic functionalities and give relevant feedback.

We expect that the first stable version be available at the half of this year, in both community and comercial releases.

Mizura project is maintained by 3layer Foundation developers and sponsored by LM2 Consulting, both brazilian organizations.