Fulcrum is an application to provide a user story based backlog management system for agile development teams. See the project page for more details.

Fulcrum is still in early development, so now is the time to make your mark on the project.

There are 2 discussion groups for Fulcrum:

• Fulcrum Users - A general discussion group for users of Fulcrum.
• Fulcrum Developers - Discussion on the development of Fulcrum.

Fulcrum is a clone of Pivotal Tracker. It will almost certainly never surpass the functionality, usability and sheer awesomeness of Pivotal Tracker, but aims to provide a usable alternative for users who require a Free and Open Source solution.

Fulcrum is still a work in progress, but if you're really keen to try it out these instructions will hopefully help you get up and running.

First up, your system will need the prerequisites for running Ruby on Rails 3.0.x installed

Once you have these:

# Checkout the project
$ git clone git://github.com/malclocke/fulcrum.git
$ cd fulcrum

# Install the project dependencies
$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install

# Set up the development database
$ rake db:setup

# Start the local web server
$ rails server

You should then be able to navigate to http://localhost:3000/ in a web browser. You can log in with the test username [email protected], password testpass.

If you wish to host a publicly available copy of Fulcrum, the easiest option is to host it on Heroku.

To deploy it to Heroku, make sure you have a local copy of the project; refer to the previous section for instuctions. Then:

# Make sure you have the Heroku gem
$ gem install heroku

# Create your app. Replace APPNAME with whatever you want to name it.
$ heroku create APPNAME --stack bamboo-mri-1.9.2

# Define where the user emails will be coming from
# (This email address does not need to exist)
$ heroku config:add [email protected]

# Allow emails to be sent
$ heroku addons:add sendgrid:free

# Deploy the first version
$ git push heroku master

# Set up the database
$ heroku rake db:setup

Once that's done, you will be able to view your site at http://APPNAME.heroku.com.

Fulcrum is currently welcoming contributions, but if you're planning on implementing a major feature please contact us first, your feature may already be in progress.

The following features are being developed actively at the moment:

• Iterations
• Comments

Particularly welcome at the time of writing would be UI improvement and clean ups.

For any development, please bear the following in mind:

• Please send patches as either github pull requests or as git patches. Try to break patches up into the smallest logical blocks possible. We'd prefer to receive many small commits to one large one.
• All patches should be covered by tests, and should not break the existing tests, unless a current test is invalidated by a code change. This includes Javascript, which is covered with a Jasmine test suite in spec/javascripts/.
• For any UI changes, please try to follow the Tango theme guidelines.

Fulcrum is built with the following Open Source technologies:

• Ruby on Rails
• Backbone.js
• jQuery
• Tango Icon Library
• Jasmine
• Sinon

Copyright 2011, Malcolm Locke.

Fulcrum is made available under the Affero GPL license version 3, see LICENSE.txt.