Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
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.
Related
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
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.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
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.
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
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.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
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
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 11 years ago.
Improve this question
Is Microsoft Project the best tool for managing software development or IT projects or is there an alternative that is better?
Project is not good for managing development at all. I find it marginally useful for scheduling / work breakdown.
If you're on a Microsoft stack, Team Foundation Server is a good project management solution. It integrates with Project for scheduling and also provides the essentials of source control, work item (task / defect) tracking, and document management (via sharepoint.) The 2008 version has matured nicely, and the 2010 version looks very promising, especially in the area of requirements specification and traceability.
You can replicate the TFS features with a stack of open source and/or less expensive off-the-shelf software, but it is more work to integrate. It's debatable which is more flexible and easier to maintain once set up.
The following are required, regardless of platform:
Bug tracking
Work item / story / progress tracking of some kind (may be managed by above)
Collective team discussion (may be managed by above - discussion on work items, like FogBugz for example)
Source control (anything but SourceSafe)
Continuous build integration that runs unit tests
Instant messaging (OpenFire works great if your network blocks external services)
Document library
Farm of virtualized test machines (especially useful for install/upgrade testing)
I tend to use MSProject for capacity planning - a nice big broad brush of who could do what over a period, at a level of abstraction that makes it easy to rejig plans. For day to day tracking of the real work, I use Fogbugz. I think of it as MSProject/Gantty stuff for the strategic planning, and Fogbugz for the tactical management and planning.
Depends on the process you're using - if it's a waterfall like process, or there's a lot of non-software parts of the project (infrasstructure, manufacturing, marketing etc) then Project's OK for the overall task management - it's certainly competitive with other similar tools.
I don't think any of the "project management" tools (tasks, WBS, gannt charts etc) are much good at the management of the detailed tasks that happen when you're into the main software development phase - I usually end up in Excel for the projects I'm involved in.
And of course, there is much more to the successful management of a non-trivial software project than the bit that can be managed with a tool like Project. It doesn't help much with managing the requirements, issues, defects, meetings, test development etc - but then it's not supposed to.
Because of these limitations, I find I usually get most value out of Project in the planning phase - working out the task breakdown, what needs to be done, and roughly what needs to happen in what order.
As Eisenhower put it: "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." MS Project is a useful tool for planning.
If also need a free and open alternative to Project, you have OpenProj: http://openproj.org/openproj
We use Target Process here. It has a few "-isms", but overall is a good agile project management tool
We've been successfully using MS Project for planning but were missing the ability to share MS Project plans with customers and colleagues who don't have it installed. This led us to the idea of online Microsoft Project viewer - a service that would allow to view and share MS Project files (.mpp) online, apart from MS Project:
Hope this helps.
We use Acunote at my work place, but we follow a Agile/Scrum methodology.
What constitutes the "best tool" depends on many things. How you run your projects, who will be using them, etc.
There are many better alternatives, at least for software development. One such is embedded in Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. You may also want to check out tools from Rally Software and Version One. The latter are well suited to agile methods, while the former supports both agile and traditional CMM methods.
Well, given the fact that not even the Project team uses Project for Project (Source: Joel Spolsky), I would not want to use it for development.
I track my development tasks in our Bug Tracker, and the Project File just has something like "Planning 1 Week, Development 5 Weeks, QA 3 Weeks, Deployment 1 Week", aka. a VERY broad overview.
As for the BugTracker, FogBugz has this nice Estimate-Tracking that I find quite useful for making schedules, which is for me just another reason to not use Project.
But then again, I am not a Project Manager, so to me, Project is just an unnecessary complex, not really multi-user friendly and somewhat dated-feeling Tool to be used when building Houses, Highways or Space Stations, but not for Software.
We use Primavera on my project. Its supposed to be great although its the only tool I haven't really used for project management so far so I can't really compare it to anything else. Its not that easy to pick up but it can do everything I need (and apparently much more).
My favourite feature is the built in timesheets functionality which means my developers can book their hours to their tasks at the end of the week meaning that I don't need to constantly bug them about how they are progressing against their plans.
personally i dont believe ms project is good for software dev (i have used it, im not bashing it to be a purist)
its great if you are building a house or something which doesnt have such uncontrollable variables (e.g. how many bugs will you have? how long will bugs take to fix? how much feature-creep will there be?)
i like to keep my schedules very simple so more people can understand them, hence why i just use a google spreadsheet
the structure i use is described further here: Project Schedules with Google Spreadsheets
hope this helps
--LM