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I'm looking for a small scale open source project managment tool. i'm currently looking for a more treditional tool and not necessarily one designed especially for scrum or agile.
i've worked in the past with test director and HP Quality Center. i was very happy with QC.
The main features i'm looking for are
Managing versions.
Managing customer / technical demands.
Managing tasks (assignment + tracking).
Managing tests (nice to have).
I've looked around recommandations here in the site and google and found Trac (there is no tutorial or screen shots available) , Teambox (looks too simple) , Pivotal Tracker (looks promising) and Open Atrium (wich also lacks a demo).
I will appreciate any suggestions regarding an apropriate tool for the tasks, and comments you might have on any of the tools mentioned above.
I use Trac with project-management also, and can recommend it as sufficient as I read your needs above.
Native Trac comes without project-management support. Look at the plugin recommendation site of Trac. IMO best is when you add the following plugins to a freshly installed Trac-1.0:
SimpleMultiProjectPlugin
TimingAndEstimationPlugin
EstimationToolsPlugin
TracJsGanttPlugin
MasterTicketsPlugin
​SubticketsPlugin
ChildTicketsPlugin
FullBlogPlugin
TracTicketStatsPlugin
This is a good combination of all you need for good project-management. They can all be found at trac-hacks.org and plugin installation is quite easy for Trac.
The basic idea is to plan everything based on tickets:
There are different types of tickets: 'task', 'defect', 'enhancement' or you could define new own ones.
Then you assign your tickets to projects, versions and milestones, there are ticket fields for that.
You can also plan dependencies of tasks by using ticket fields 'parent', 'blocked by', 'blocking'. Gantt charts can display those relationships.
You can query all tickets by those fields and display the results in tables.
The teams can completely work based on tickets, every work could be described and planned with tickets. Traditional defect tracking tickets, but also even tasks or task packages can be reflected in tickets. Plan the owner, start and end dates. Group them and watch them in the charts to compare plan and reality.
Managing versions
Trac comes with milestones displayed as dated progress bars on a time-sorted Roadmap page. SimpleMultiProjectPlugin adds versions to that Roadmap page, and allows to filter by projects. Your ticket tables are links behind each progress bar. For example look here.
Managing customer / technical demands
You probably mean Requirement Management. There is no direct support for it in Trac, but I would simply organize such things with tickets and maybe additional links to wiki pages or external documents.
Managing tasks (assignment + tracking)
Each ticket lives in the life cycle (workflow can be changed to your needs, see also AdvancedTicketWorkflowPlugin) of states. It's in your hand to organize how you live this workflow. One of the suggested is:
'new' - ticket without owner, just stored for later work, project may be set already
'assigned' - ticket with owner, now scheduled to a certain milestone or version
'accepted' - the owner starts to work on it
'testing' - work has finished, testing starts, the owner likely changed now
'closed' - everything finished
'needs_work', 'reopened' - states like 'new' and 'assigned' but used to make clear it already was 'testing' or 'closed'
You need to define rules in your organisation who can change the states in the workflow, e.g. project manager or worker or test department. It's up to you. Some things can be supported by Trac's permission system.
The tracking of the ticket progress is supported in many different ways:
progress bars of milestones and versions
workload, burndown and Gantt charts
ticket statistics charts
ticket queries as tables, lists, ...
milestone charts (UpcomingMilestonesChartMacro)
... many more ...
Managing tests
TestManagerForTracPlugin could be your friend there. Although this feature is ways better supported with tools like HP Quality Center.
In the end there are many plugins for Trac, it's very flexible and scalable, and it's written in Python, means you can easily hack and fit it to your needs.
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I like Pivotal Tracker, however I do not agree with their approach of using a "star" system, rather than asking programmers to provide real time estimates. I think there should be accountability so that programmers learn to get better about providing time estimates. The star system appears designed to insulate developers from this, which I think is counter-productive.
Is there something like Pivotal Tracker where programmers provide real time estimates?
I would also like something that has a report which shows the total estimated time for all outstanding issues, on a per-programmer basis.
In the past we rolled our own using Trac, but would prefer a more modern solution. I'm considering using Github Issues (we already use Github for source control), and building some tools that use the Github Issues API to facilitate per-issue time estimates in the manner I've described.
I'd appreciate any suggestions.
TargetProcess (www.targetprocess.com) is the cleanest and most fluid tool I've found.
make it work for you: just go to your pivotal tracker project's settings and choose custom estimates, or maybe Fibonacci, and use that for hour/day estimations
Check out Assembla Agile Planner - it s very similar and free for unlimited users/tasks: http://www.assembla.com/catalog/tag/Free
Try Breeze, it allows you to add estimates (in hours) and also log work done under every task, plus it has a time tracker built in. Reports are also available, showing totals for projects and work done per task. You can also export the reports to CSV.
Overall it has a similar Kanban style layout and system.
You can try JIRA or Version one.
JIRA : very powerful and flexible , it supports Scrum , kanban or you can invent your customized issue tracking workflow.
Version one : very organized and has an easy workflow (Scrum only) & supports managing dependency of user stories & tasks.
Finally , Github is good tool for managing projects as well but it will not be a good solution for you because you can not add an estimate for issues you can only set a dead line for a milestone also it has some constraints that you should be aware of while choosing.
You can only one level of tasks , there is no nesting which will make it tricky to manage a user story and its sub-tasks - a work around for that we use labels.
You can not delete an issue , you can only archive it or close it.
You can not attach an image or file directly to it , you'll have to do it using the Markdown syntax and push the images to the repository first.
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We outsourced a web based portal and now we're not interested to work with them because the site is becoming more buggy day by day and increase of customers complain.
We've chosen a different team based on their local reputation and their portfolio are good to satisfy our urgent needs. We discussed this project with them and during a week they suggested some good ideas which help us to control. We are agreed to award this project to them. What I am thinking during the transition:
What documents do you think which can help new developers to understand the application? How many kinds of document I can request to them? If a new developers start working on it those documents help them to understand easily of all sides (application, database, configuration etc)
The application is on ASP.NET and SQL SERVER 2005 and the scariest part of all no source control tool is there. They do direct deployments without even push the publish button. Touch Luck :(
Thanks.
That's kind of hard to answer without knowing what kind of portal it is, but what comes to mind:
Owner's manual: Description of functionality, technologies used, full overview of all machines and services involved (don't forget data bases)
Backup: How and where is data backed up, where to restore it from in case of a crash
Description of all Databases used, relations between tables, at least quick rundown on what data is stored where
Links to any and all URLs to administration interfaces, tools, and scripts
Day-to-day operation: What cron jobs need to run frequently, are there caches, file lists or other things that need to be taken care of frequently
Make sure all domains used belong to you and are under your control
a description of the project's file structure (which part is where; where is the API; where are the visual elements; where are the front controllers)
How-To's on how to change the visual elements of the site (Style sheets, forms, templates...)
A description of any and all URL rewriting operations that take place in various parts of the systems, and where they point to
Which Google Analytics / Google Webmaster account is used and how to get hold of it
Ideally, an API documentation and full phpDoc style source code documentation
In addition to #Pekka's good answer I'd add the following
Functional Design Document (or
Business Requirements) - One that
explains how the application should
work from a business perspective.
Technical Specification (or
Architecture document) - One that
explains how the application was
developed from a technical
perspective.
Application Support
Guide - Some form of cheat sheet that
explains the common problems, service
accounts, batch schedules... etc
In addition to documentation you should be aware of the incident trends;
How may incidents?
How often?
How long do they take to resolve?
How many known defects are there?
Who maintains the infrastructure (patching OS, security audits, etc)
If you don't have enough technical resources to cover the daily number of incidents (keeping in mind there might be peak periods when usage of the portal is high) then you will probably find yourself in the same situation as your current service provider.
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I am going to be starting a new job in a few weeks where I will be responsible for both the maintenance and development of a couple of existing web applications and the development of new web applications.
As I will be the only developer on the project and the previous developer was more of a hobbyist, no formal project management or planning techniques have been followed. Additionally no bug tracking has been used or if anything has been recorded its just been notes on paper.
I would therefore like to introduce a better system to help resolve some of the issues and help ensure things run more smoothly. I intend to develop using an agile process (likely scrum) and would therefore like to know what all-in-one solutions people could recommend for me to look into further. I am looking for something which will provide at minimum:
Project Planning
Defining new features
Time estimating
Ability to organise tasks by priority
Project Management
Tracking active tasks
Reporting
Bug Tracking
I would also like to let other staff easily submit new bugs in the applications which they find or customers report. Additionally support for them to add new stories / high level tasks would be of use so they can note down other new requirments/features and I can then work with them to outline more detailed tasks and estimates.
So far I have looked at a number of systems including:
FogBugz - Seems great for bug reporting but would need something else for project planning / management
Agile Buddy - This is probably the best solution I have found so far
Trac
Smart Sheets
Pivotal Tracker
However, as I have not actually used any of these systems myself I do not know what ones would be best or whether there is a better solution out there??? So any recommendations you can provide would be much appreciated.
Actually, FogBugz does project management as well. It will even try to learn how accurate time estimates for features are from each user, and give you estimated milestone completion times accordingly, with probabilities of finishing at various dates. I've used it for the bug tracking, and really liked it, but I've also read enough about its project management features to know that it has them, and they're pretty good.
FogBugz feature list
When I was working as a solitary developer, I picked up a copy of Planning Extreme Programming and bought a pack of 3x5 cards and a plastic box for them. I used those in the Planning Game and stuck the ones I was working on on my wall. My boss could walk by and see what I was working on. This worked well and cost little.
We're currently using Zen at work - it's a web-based Kanban board for planning. This is nice when your stakeholders aren't co-located or if priorities/requirements change frequently.
You can enter bugs as user stories with either system, or you could use a separate defect-tracking system.
I'd question if Scrum is suitable for a one-developer shop. It's targeted towards project management. I'd rather not have a stand-up meeting with myself. ;) XP (minus pair programming) works fine for a solitary developer.
For a one-man show, you don't need any tools to speak of.
Tools -- generally -- are for coordination.
If it's just you, what -- precisely -- are you coordinating?
If you want to make things visible, a pair of simple internally-focused web pages built from static content will do.
Bugs.
Burndown for Features.
That's about it. Use the simplest tools you can possibly use. I recommend using docutils to generate the HTML from plain, simple text.
Don't go tool-happy until you have a large enough team that simple text doesn't work any more.
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At the place I am working we are moving to a more agile approach to project management.
For tool support for project management I used MS Project and Target Process in the past. But I think they both have serious weaknesses:
MS Project is not very intuitive and therefore hard to use especially for novice users. It doesn't really fit the agile approach
Target Process seems only half done. E.g. users can set their own privileges to admin. Size of user stories is measured in hours instead of a unitless size which I think is really a bad idea. The UI feels bloated and overly complicated not really supporting usage by keyboard only.
We are also using Jira for Issue Tracking and I guess one could modify it and add some custom fields/reports to make it an agile project management tool.
So my question is: What software tools do you use for agile project management and what do you like or dislike about it?
Addition: I am aware that physical tools like a whiteboard or post-its are in a sense the perfect tool but if you want to get an overview about what is going on in the complete company it is kind of cumbersome to run from office to office to look at the whiteboards or to force people to copy it in a different kind of document. A similiar argument applies if you are working in a setting where the customer is not on site.
I'll try to list some features I'd consider interesting:
easy accessible by management, customer, team potentially from different sites. This almost requires a web app.
option to configure the app to fit the flavor of agile preferred by the team or company
it should allow multiple people to access it in parallel. E.g. a developer marking a task/story as done, shouldn't block the customer from adding a new task. This pretty much rules out Excel.
Nice usability for keyboard only usage, at least for things like updating a lot of stories or adding a lot of stories
Ability to integrate with Jira (entries there should become tasks or something in the system, changes should get synchronized or at least be impossible if they don't get synchronized) and SVN (commit comments with a story id should appear in the tool)
Ability to integrate with other systems using a Java API.
Mostly we use whiteboards and post-its. If we have to use software we usually use Trac or a simple wiki.
It's our experience that using a project management tool actually makes your project less agile. The tool tends to become the focus point of the whole development process and its data more important than the actual software.
I can really recommend using a physical tool instead of a software one. It keep everybody focused in the same location and is much more public and accessible then even the simplest software equivalent.
There is value in using a tool to provide visibility into your agile project when it is not pragmatic to come to the team room. I would not recommend using a tool other than the big visible charts in the team room in place of the big visible charts. When a person has to go to a tool to pull the information as opposed to see the information continuously visible in the team room, it looses its effectiveness.
Of the tools we have used my comments are as follows
Mingle - Programmable and the most customizable, largest learning curve but you won't be boxed into a corner and the learning curve is quickly picked up by a developer
Rally - Does what you need it to out of the box. Enforces agile practices and has a small learning curve. Reports are good.
Version One - Swiss army knife of agile tools. Easy, full of features, great query tool to extract project data, need to ensure hosted service provides the performance you need
XPlanner - free, basic but non-evolving, easy for the team to use, less capable in the reporting department
Excel - works great, most people start with it and the file can be posted to a WIKI that can be downloaded and viewed by anyone
Consider the licensing. A number of the tools can post results in HTLM which can be read from a WIKI as a dashboard report. If you need to control access to the data then providing a license to the tools or providing a login to the WIKI should meet your needs.
Redmine, it is easy to use and contains enough features.
What specific problems are you facing with your current project management software that you want to address.. What specific flavor of agile are you moving to ?
The first bullet is kind of shaky... in that novice users should not really be doing project management. Other arguments read like 'MS Project should not behave like MS Project'
If you want a simplified tool for a product backlog which seems to be what you're looking for.. use a spreadsheet and see if it works out. If not, move to complex ones.
There's a similar thread in SO ... dupe or does this thread deviate significantly ?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/426458/recommendations-for-project-management-software-for-scrum
I actually use Atlassian's JIRA for all my Agile project management. And with their recent acquisition of GreenHopper, they fully integrated SCRUM into the project management as well. This is only available in the Beta version right now though.
My team is using Rally. I also used VersionOne a few years ago, but I think Rally is better. I am not an expert in all features, but I think it does most of the things you need.
Don't even try MS project ...
Axosoft's OnTime
CounterSoft Gemini (at least take their 5 user license for free)
There's a new tool - Bright Green Projects. It allows you to capture and prioritize requirements, build estimates, manage iterations, track issues.. etc. Nice interface and really easy to use: http://www.brightgreenprojects.com
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We have MS Sharepoint -- which isn't all bad for managing a task list. The data's publicly available, people are notified of changes and assignments.
I think that Bugzilla might be a little easier for management and reporting purposes. While there are some nice Open Source Scrum management tools, I've used up a lot of my political capital and can't ask for too much more than what we've got now. Money isn't the object -- obviously -- it's the idea that my team has too many specialized tools.
Will Bugzilla work out as a more general project management tool -- outside the bug fix use cases?
Will I be bitterly disappointed and wish I'd downloaded something else and made my case for a better project management tool?
Bugzilla Is a great bug tracking system. We have tried to use it for other project management tasks and the results are less then stellar. I would recommend finding something designed with your goals in mind.
Try it for yourself.
Get a $15/month account at wush.net and use it yourself for a while (no business relationship besides satisfied customer).
Bugzilla is powerful and has a lot of configuration options, which can be confusing.
I personally used it three years ago on a project I was working on. I had no project manager and I was the developer, so I needed a very-light-overhead systtem. Bugzilla gave me that. I put my main goal as an enhancement "productionalized system" and then I made dependencies to reach that point. I ended up having 160 nodes all dependent on each other. This essentially was a work breakdown structure. I didn't bother with time estimates, and I didn't bother with creating any other kind of project documentation.
A cool advantage was that as I coded, if I noticed something needed to be done, I would just pop it into bugzilla (20 second process once it's set up), tie it as a dependency, and go back to what I was doing.
Whenever I completed a task, I would look at the dependency diagram and find the outermost leaves (bugs that blocked other but weren't themselves blocked), and work at it.
The advantage of this method for me is that if a task had looked simple and had one node associated with it, but when doing the thing itself I realized it was more complex, I would just split it into different subtasks. This took only a minute and absolutely didn't involve a meeting with a project manager.
Other people on the team could track my progress by looking at open bugs, closed bugs sorted by dates, etc. They saw action, they left me alone. When I had external dependecies, I would make a bug, detail the work, and send that person a link via email. They could then see why this was needed by looking at the dependency diagram.
Note that unless previously agreed upon, I did not assign them the bug.
It worked really well and the system was ready one month early.
How will it work with SCRUM? Having only had a cursory glance at scrum I can't tell you. But that was my experience.
Using a dedicated host will allow you three things:
support
easy upgrades (unless you got gurus in-house, bugzilla management ain't easy--for me at least)
users across organizational boundaries.
Note that bugzilla has all sorts of security features, so it's easy to lock-down the users to what they need to see.
My stand-alone solution is DokuWiki + MantisBT + Subversion + Review Board, which can be integrated with relative ease. Hosted alternative is Bitbucket.org. The rationale is you write user stories on Wiki and can reference them specific tasks. Larger bugs can be collaboratively designed and the "wiki" link is provided on the bug report by Mantis. Review board lets you do peer code reviews against svn diff before change is committed.
We've used Trac and Subversion very successfully for several projects.
The main advantage here is being able to tailor reports, some very Scrum specific, to provide information to management.