LeapingLemming is the project code name for our collaborative project planning and estimating tool.

This tool is still in the analysis phase but is based around the concept of simple project estimating. As inspired by http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.htm . Our tool will manage a central project tasks list and allow the project manager to allocate those tasks to team members or team leaders. Team leaders can create sub-tasks from their tasks and allocated them to their staff. Finally individual staff members can plan their own work by breaking each job down further into as many separate mini steps as they need.

Each task and sub task records an original duration estimate value, a remaining time estimate and elapsed time estimate.

As staff members fill out remaining time estimates on their tasks this information is quickly fed up the tree of tasks to modify the project completion date. The information is also passed up the management tree so that team leaders can reallocate resources to jobs that are quickly mushrooming above estimates.

For example if a team leader estimates a task is one man day and allocates it to a member of staff who breaks the task into 20 necessary steps that each need 3-4 hours, then there was probably a mistake in the estimate.

In addition the reporting data will eventually get passed into a time sheet and customer invoicing system.It all sounds very useful and the best thing is we are planning to give it away for free.

Once we have a solid code base we intend to open source this application and let the world use it. It will be hosted on sourceforge.org.

We are mainly developing this tool to help us on our own projects and are not planning to offer a warranty for it. If we open source it we get to help the software development community a little, and hopefully developers from outside our company will contribute some time to the project, which will benefit us.

Finally if the project becomes popular there may be a long-term market to bespoke add-ons which we would be happy to develop for specific customers. This is closer to our core business strength.