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I have a project in the free hosted FogBugz On Demand (FOD) product right now. This is great for feature/issue tracking. But I've been working from a codebase that is solely on my development machine. I'd like to collaborate with another guy who is thousands of miles from me. So we need a source control solution (SCM)!
I use Visual Studio (2005, but can upgrade to later versions as needed).
I am aware that FogBugz can integrate with a number of source control systems.
So now the question is: which online SCM products can integrate well with FOD and VS? And which ones do so well at low or no cost, for a small code repository. And where might I find a proven recipe for putting this together.
I'm open to other solutions which provide the same functionality. Please don't suggest Trac - I regard it highly, but I want the features of FOB (especially the evidence based scheduling) in my issue tracking solution. So really, I need to combine FOB + VS + some online SCM product into a low or no cost solution for two coders to collaborate on.
Well, the obvious solution is to go with the product designed with FogBugz on Demand in mind:
Kiln, from Fog Creek
It is in beta right now, and I don't know what the waiting times to get into beta are like with it, but it might be worth a look for you.
I'm currently working with another developer and I have an SVN server set up at home. I've got it hooked up to WebSVN so that we can access it through port 80 and all works like a charm. We've got it hooked into FogBugz on Demand.
You should be able to use a service like DynDNS (or similar) to keep them linked if you don't have a static IP address. I've got a static IP which alleviates this need, but it's free and allows access to my SVN repo from the office or to the other developer I'm working with.
I can't speak for online services though... I haven't used any of them. I know this isn't strictly the answer you're looking for, but thought I'd throw it out there because of the fact that it would be free.
If you don't get into Kiln beta (or don't want the extra cost once it's out of beta), you should try mercurial.
I'm not sure how good the VS integration is, but I've heard it's getting better.
You can host a mercurial server at bitbucket.org for not much money, which now has (untested by me) Fogbugz integration (http://www.bitbucket.org/help/service-integration/)
http://beanstalkapp.com/
They seem to offer Subversion hosting for a small project like yours for $15/month. Not sure if that qualifies for 'low' cost, but if the source code you are developing means anything to you (which I assume it would!) $15 a month seems pretty cheap for a reliable source repository.
I don't work for or represent that company, just something I found when looking for subversion hosting.
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What is a best way to organize many software development projects, interaction with clients, project documentation, sources, emails, knowledge, time tracking, issue and features tracking, support for releases and versions etc. for a small company?
For me (and I believe for many others) it is obvious that it must be some sort of web-based solutions. It would be great if it could provide an interface for iPhone (if not, it is also OK).
Important thing: it must be hosted on our servers, so PHP + MySQL is the best platform so far.
I have found the following system to consider:
http://www.activecollab.com/ (but I didn't found issue tracking as well as support for releases and versions, so it is not the best match for software development company)
http://www.mantisbt.org/ (Great tool, but no project planing...)
http://www.twproject.com/ (didn't try yet, but it has very strange interface)
But none of them is a 100% solution for me.
It also should (but not must) support SCRUM
We have about 25 people in our team and about 50 from client side. At once we run about 3-7 projects (some in dev. phase, some in support).
So, my questions: does anybody knows any good web-based system that gives everything software development company needs? I believe this information will be useful for many of us.
I would recommend FogBugz
They have a very interesting (admittedly not everyone's cup of tea) scheduling system and is apparently supporting scrum.
Their support for release management is something i'm particularly fond of, but i should also say that i have very little experience of other similar systems.
Another feature that I like is the ability to link different e-mail accounts as well as pure HTML forms to different projects.
Oh, and it is not a MySQL/PHP solution.
Some of the features are:
Issue tracking
Project planning
Scheduling
Customer support
Wiki
References:
Scrum and Fogbugz / Fogbugz questions / FogBugz Knowledge Exchange
I think it really depends on your company size. I used activecollab for a while but it never really convinced me and then they made it commercial anyway. There is an open source fork of it called ProjectPier.
Even if it is not MySQL + PHP but Ruby On Rails Redmine convinced me the most from all tools I tried (and installing the ruby module into apache is a question of 5 minutes). It is simpel and yet has anything I need (including Eclipse Mylyn, SCM integration, E-Mail Notification and time tracking). With a little RoR knowledge it is easily customizable, too.
The most popular Open Source sollution is probably Trac. It is written in Python, so it is not a PHP either.
But maybe it makes sense to consider a non PHP sollution. I didn't find any PHP open source tool that had the functionality and simplicity of Redmine or Trac. If you don't mind a hosted sollution Basecamp is probably the first address to turn to (never tried it though).
Trac with Agilo plugin might be a good option.
Here is link for Trac pluigns, some category are:
Code Documentation
User feedback and discussions
For another pespective - having used many of the above solutions, and liking them very much for bug tracking, wiki documentation and tracking information - I tend to move towards keeping much of my project "meta-data" (summary information pulling together wiki, bugs, schedules, communication) in spreadsheets now.
For those now climbing onto the top rope of the ring preparing for a takedown, here's why... I come from a programming background, and one of the best books I read early in my career was The Pragmatic Programmer. One of the tenets they preach is finding a fundamental editor that you like, and get good with it (for various Very Good Reasons). After trying (frustratingly) to port and adapt my PM/Dev Management approach multiple times to multiple systems, I've extrapolated that Pragmatic tooling philosophy to the product/project management world I now inhabit. To stretch the metaphor, my editor is now Excel.
I can't guarantee that for any company I work with, they have "Software Project Management xyz" or "Bug Tracking System abc" with the proper plugins - but I can be darn well sure they have Excel or some variant available. I know if I get ninja-like with that tool, I can continue to use it - and focus on the project, not the tools.
This spreadsheet approach comes with some caveats:
Excel done poorly can suck. We've all seen that. Watch for bloat and stupidity.
Keep the bugs in the bug tracking system, the wiki stuff in the wiki. The spreadsheet is meant to pull this stuff together, not replace it.
Keep it readable. Don't stuff everything in just because you can. Summary sheets are good.
Try to standardize your templates and macros meaningfully for tasks and information, to maximize reuse over time and projects. Just like good programming.
Back it up - use a document management system if you can. This approach isn't in the cloud or hosted centrally by default, so be aware of that.
Have you tried Assembla? They've recently released a new product called Portfolio which is great if you have to manage multiple projects + you get free clients! :)
You might like to consider http://targetprocess.com/ We use that in my current job and it works pretty well, from a developer point of view. I'm unsure as to whether it supports your installation requirements, however.
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We're currently not applying the automated building and testing of continous integration in our project. We haven't bothered this far as we're only 2 developers working on it, but even with a team of 2 I still think it would be valuable to use continous integration and get a confirmation that our builds don't break or tests start failing.
We're using .Net with C# and WPF. We have created Python-scripts for building the application - using MSbuild - and for running all tests. Our source is in SVN.
What would be the best approach to apply continous integration with this setup? What tool should we get? It should be one which doesn't require alot of setup. Simple procedures to get started and little maintanance is a must.
Have a look at JetBrains' TeamCity. Free for a small team like yours. Easy to install and minimal fuss. And it looks good. Far better than CruiseControl.NET.
CruiseControl.NET is good too, but definitely requires more work to get setup.
I've been using Hudson (open source software) and found it really flexible. It's more popular in the Java community, but there are MSBuild and MSTest plug-ins available. Hudson also makes it easy to schedule builds or run builds when changes are checked into svn. I found this blog very useful as a starting point.
Cruise Control .NET
Try Cruise (http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/cruise-release-management) (the re-write of CruiseControl.NET) by Thoughtworks. Its very sexy, much easier to get going and very nice to use. Great feedback too. And its free for teams of less than 10.
Even with two its a great tool to have and once you've done it once its much easier to set up other projects. Having it build, fresh, from SVN when you check in and then tell you everything is ok is a really nice feeling thats easy to get used to.
Allow a good two days though for any build system to wire it all up, thats not installing thats just getting everyhing wired up as it should be. Trick is to do baby steps, get it checking out your code and add more and more layers as you go. Once you have a base set up you can add the other bells and whistles when you get time until after a week or two you have the whole thing singing and dancing. Sounds like a lot of work but its well worth it.
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We are "upgrading" the systems at the company, moving from SourceSafe/BugNet/... (yeahy!) to some more serious systems. TFS is too expensive. We have come down to comparing OnTime vs Gemini. They both seem OK with an "OK" price-tag. We will of-course download and try them out both, but it would be nice with comments from experienced users. To me, they seem quite equal.
Has anyone used both, and can compare the two against each-other?
If you would recommend one of these, which one, and why?
Any other experiences with these systems? (Especially Gemini, seems hard to find reviews regarding this-one..?)
(We are talking about a smaller dev-team, max 8 dev in a project at a time, a couple of testers and some stakeholders/managers etc... Several projects running simultaneously. Need to be able to integrate to Visual Studio, Subversion with feed-back to the issue tracker etc)
Thanks for your time!
We use OnTime here - it has a good workflow environment but be warned that it does not scale well at all. We currently have 35 licenses with only 10 to 15 users online at any one time and it struggles.
Also be careful of the sales pitch for using the web or "remote" servers for distributed environments - it works fine with the demo/eval database but slows to a crawl once you start getting a decent amount of items in the database. All you have to do is look at a SQL profiler and you'll see the number of calls made to the DB.
If you profile the web services you'll also see that the web and remote environments have not been optimized at all to batch calls, so as soon as you move to an environment where there is any kind of communication latency it crawls.
Axosoft's support has been less than helpful on this as well - they strangely do not view these as bugs and instead view this as something we should expect in these environments. We have contacted their support over a number of other things as well and it is surprising how poor it is over other things as well.
Axosoft's excuse is that we should have found these things out in the eval period, but I don't know how they expected us to scale the data to production environment levels within a 30 day eval period...
We have been forced to revert to using the WinForm client over Citrix for our distributed teams.
Overall - it is a nice application if you have a small team in a single location. But if you have larger teams or people spread out in multiple locations I would avoid it at all costs.
Gemini is great, we selected gemini over many other bug tracking systems...
main features we liked:
user interface
extensibility (API's, REST based)
addon products (visual studio, outlook plugins)
source control integration (subversion)
source code available (asp.net c#), easy to setup and great support.
For a broader comparison with Gemini bug tracker and others in the same space, wikipedias Bug tracking comparison page might be of use. Although I don't know of a direct, in depth Gemini / OnTime comparison.
Take a look at Project Kaiser (short demo available). It is fast, web-based, supports embedded wiki, forums and chats. And it is free for 5 users :)
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Does anyone have recommendations for a good task/time management tool.
Ideally this would just keep track of programming tasks / the project and the time spent also the option to produce an end of week report would be advantageous
at the lower end, for free software, there's ToDoList
FogBugz is your friend too. FB6 is a great PM tacking tool, I've been using 5 to manage my team and I'm trying to pry the money for FB 6 out of those that hold the purse strings.
For open source/ 1 dev its free as well.
A good tool with collaboration feature as well:
http://www.producteev.com/
We have been using Eylean for our project management. It has all the features you are looking for and then some. You will be able to visualize your tasks as post it notes on a task board, estimate how much time they will take and then track them in order to see how much time they actually take up. It might be little more than what you are looking for, but i really enjoy the software.
JIRA has a log work feature. You log your work on a per task/issue bases. My boss rather likes the reports.
If you work with a large team, Team Foundation has it all. Work item tracking (which can be tied to checkins and builds!), reports, all sorts of metrics. For a small organization though the cost is probably too high.
Voo2do is pretty good. I've used it before and it's great because it's very simple to start, but you can use the extended functionality as needed. And there's an API, which can fill in the missing features.
organize tasks by project
track time spent and remaining
add tasks by email
publish task lists
as easy as paper, but on the web 24x7
supports software guru Joel Spolsky's Painless Software Scheduling method
fancy-shmancy “ajax” interface
API for custom applications
For basic commandline task tracking I use http://wtime.sourceforge.net/ It's simple but effective but only has top level tasks.
Here's another vote for FogBugz. Originally I bought it for managing client projects, but I've grown to use it for keeping track of almost everything to-do related in my life -- simple tasks, stuff to remember, small personal/home projects, books to read, etc. It's feature-rich and has a handful of nice integration points, and while it's still very much software-type-task-oriented, it's handy. Very reasonably priced for the value.
For task management for myself - Outlook
It's centralised
I have to have my email open so I don't need to worry about yet another application
Sync to server so I can get it anywhere I have a browser
Sync to phone so I get reminders when not at the desk
Emails can be flagged as tasks
For task management for a team - TFS 2008 with SP 1. There is some nice enhancements in there with alerting that makes a big difference.
We use Smartsheet as a tasking and collaboration tool. It's pretty well based on the idea of a spreadsheet that you can add your own columns to. The sheets can be shared amongst team members, it sends you emails when anything changes, it has file share (without limit) - you can also give external people access so that they can raise bug notifications etc. that then get notified to the team. Works very well for us as it is SO flexible
I recommend Task Coach, an open source, single person, hierarchical task manager that allows for time tracking, categories, reminders and much more.
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So, at my current job we're usually 1-3 developers, 1-2 art directors and 1 project manager on each project, with the smallest ones just being one of each and the larger ones being three developers and two art directors.
I'm looking for a software, combination of softwares or some type of service that will allow us to manage our projects individually, it's important that we're able to manage several projects at once within one system/piece of software (without going through a too complicated setup process for each project) since we usually have 2-3 ongoing projects in parallel.
We need to be able to integrate with SVN, Track bugs/features/request, Put up milestones and some type of agile management a´la SCRUM would be nice.
Preferably it should be able to run on Windows (without to much hassle, ever tried to put up Apache+Python+Svn+Trac on the same Windows 2003 server and get them all to run together? not fun.) since we mostly do .NET development and most of our servers run Windows 2003.
Since you seem to have a maximum of six people working in a single room - I'd give serious consideration to not using software at all.
A whiteboard & cork board for each project, plus a whole lot of index cards / stickies can go a long, long way towards meeting the project management needs of one or two small projects.
(Failing that - I've found basecamp a fairly lightweight tool for small projects - although it doesn't do any sort of source control integration. I've also heard good things about the latest FogBugz - but I've had such bad personal experiences of earlier versions I've not tried it yet myself)
http://www.project-open.org/ covers your requirements and is available for Windows. However it is targeted at larger organizations (>20 employees), so that you might find it overkill for a group of 6.
I personally use BaseCamp for my company and have had great luck with it!
Edit oops, I didn't notice the SVN requirement, BaseCamp can help with the other stuff.
You might want to try out Mantis (www.mantisbt.org). It is a little cumbersome at first, but with a little bit of customization, it will work for you. It has SVN integration, and a bunch of other stuff which I haven't used yet... :|... such as Mobile support, Wiki support, etc.
And it's OSS (Open Source Software). Written in PHP, works with MySQL, or PostgreSQL. Just check it out, it's good.
http://www.mantisbt.org/
Atlassian's Jira Studio sounds like exactly what you need. It's hosted, so there's nothing to install.
If you want something that is quick and easy to work with that integrates well with Windows I would suggest Microsoft Office Groove. I have been using it on my current project and it also easily allows you to start new projects and add members.
It is not the best solution in the world, but it is included with Office '07 and it has tools to help with project management, bug reporting, calendar, meeting summaries, etc.
The one major problem I have found with it is that version control is not included by default. From what I understand you have to setup a SharePoint server to have version control in Groove, but I have not done this yet and have been hoping that my backups will work fine.
+1 for starting out with a whiteboard, stickies and whatever other office supplies you can think of. Being able to visualize the state of your project in a big visible wall can be really useful, more so than software-based tracking, IMHO.
You need to make sure the team is committed to keeping it up-to-date, though.