ThoughtWorks has released Mingle, an agile software collaboration tool.

I spoke to Martin Fowler from ThoughtWorks about this and other topics earlier this month; I will be reporting in more detail on this shortly. As I understood it, Mingle was born out of frustration with other collaboration products that were found to be inflexible or lacking in usability. It is one of the first software products from ThoughtWorks, which in the past has focused on software development and consultancy.

Usability in this context is not a matter of “if you’re smart, you can figure out how to use it”. Rather, it is about minimising effort so that the balance tips in favour of people wanting to use it, rather than doing it because they have to. I do not know yet if Mingle achieves this, but I think this is the intention. See 10 reasons why Mingle.

Mingle optionally integrates with the Subversion source code repository. It is based on the concept of all-purpose items called cards, and also includes wiki pages.

Mingle is a commercial product, but free for small teams (up to 5 users) and not-for-profit organizations.

I’ll be installing later today, on a new Ubuntu server (which has given me a few RAID problems).