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 several communication channels for Fulcrum:

• Follow @fulcrumagile on Twitter
• Fulcrum Users - A discussion group for users and developers of Fulcrum.
• You might also find someone in #fulcrum on the Freenode IRC network if you're looking for realtime help.

See the Development section below for details on contributing to the project, and Translating for details on how to help translate Fulcrum into your native language.

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 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
$ bundle exec rake fulcrum:setup 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 instructions. Then:

$ gem install heroku

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

# Set APP_HOST heroku config so outbound emails have a proper host
# Replace APPNAME below with the value from `heroku create`
$ heroku config:set APP_HOST=APPNAME.herokuapp.com

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

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

# Deploy the first version
$ git push heroku master

# Set up the database
$ heroku run rake db:setup

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

Fulcrum can be deployed to any platform that can host Rails. Setting this up is beyond the scope of this document, but for the most part Fulcrum does not have any special operational requirements and can be deployed as a normal Rails application.

You will need to set up some custom configuration, to do this copy the file config/fulcrum.example.rb to config/fulcrum.rb and edit to your requirements, or ensure the relevant environment variables are set for the application as described in the file above.

Below is an example of how you might go about translating Fulcrum to German.

• Find the name of your locale, in this case we are using de
• Copy the config/locales/en.yml file to config/locales/de.yml
• Edit the file and update all the translated strings in quotes on the right hand side.
• Add your new locale to config.i18n.available_locales in config/application.rb
• Run rake i18n:js:export to build the Javascript translations.

Thats it! Ideally you should send your translation as a pull request so you get credit for it, but if you do not wish to do this please send the file to one of the mailing lists.

If Fulcrum has already been translated for your language, please take the time to check the translation database is complete for your language. You can do this by running the rake i18n:missing_keys task. If you find any missing keys for your language please add them.

Fulcrum is currently welcoming contributions. If you'd like to help:

• Check the issue queue for a list of the major features which are yet to be implemented. These have the feature and unstarted labels. If a feature you'd like to work on isn't there, add an issue.
• Leave a description of how you are going to implement the feature. Failure to do this may lead to you implementing the feature in a way that might conflict with future plans for Fulcrum, and so increase the chances of your work being rejected or needing a rework.
• If you'd like to discuss anything about the issue in greater detail with other developers, do so on the Fulcrum Developers mailing list.

Here are some general guidelines for contributing:

• Make your changes on a branch, and use that branch as the base for pull requests.
• Try to break changes up into the smallest logical blocks possible. We'd prefer to receive many small commits to one large one in a pull request.
• Feel free to open unfinished pull requests if you'd like to discuss work in progress, or would like other developers to test it.
• All patches changes 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/.
• Run rake spec to check the Rails test suite is green. You will need Firefox with Selenium installed to run the integration tests.
• To run the Javascript test suite, run rake jasmine and point your browser to http://localhost:8888/
• For any UI changes, please try to follow the Tango theme guidelines.
• The easiest way to test the impact of CSS or view changes is using the 'testcard' at http://localhost:3000/testcard. This is a fake project which exposes as many of the view states as possible on one page.

Fulcrum is built with the following Open Source technologies:

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

Copyright 2011-2013, Malcolm Locke.

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