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As a contractor, out-sourcer and shareware author,I have about 5-10 projects going on at any one time. Each project has a todo list, requirements need to be communicated to other outsources and employees, status needs to be given to clients, and developer's questions need to be answered.
Sometimes it is too much... but then I realize that I'm not very organized and there has to be a better way.
What is your better way?
How do you keep track of requirements for multiple projects, assign work to multiple developers, obtain and give status for multiple projects to multiple clients?
What tools do you use? What processes?
This may sound really old-tech, but a different set of notepads for each project. Now, hear me out.
I know that notepads aren't searchable, and they aren't indexed, etc. But they will have meeting dates and times (if you've been taking notes during meetings, even on the phone), they have the ability of never crashing, and they're future proof in the event of wondering what you did a few years back but can't remember if the old project files made it to your new hard drive.
But the biggest reason is CYA-- logbooks and notepads can be used in the event of someone suing you as legal documents, especially if you've been diligent about dates. It might also work during patent discussions as well, showing a clear date and time of ideas being made. During another life, I worked in biology labs, and electronic record keeping, because it's so fickle, wasn't allowed for the legal reasons of being able to show that the work you did was your own. That attitude has permeated my own project notetaking, and helping to keep track of everything I need to get done.
You should have a look at No Kahuna Easy to use; Free and Pay versions; active, responsive development team.
tools are not the answer, unless you already have the knowledge, organization, and self-discipline to use them well. i highly recommend Getting Things Done
I'm a big fan of http://trac.edgewall.org/'>trac for managing software projects. It provides task and bug management with integrated wiki and source control.
We have been using FogBugz for managing several projects (10+) and clients (20+) for more than 4 years.
We have a project for each product and another project for each client. In this way I can control the requirements for each product and the pending activities related to each client.
Try Omniplan if you're on a Mac. I find it just makes sense. I also find I don't end up fighting the interface and instead concentrate on using it to help me plan better.
Edit: It goes well with OmniFocus and no, I don't work for the Omni Group :)
If you are into Agile methods (or even if not) you could try some of the Agile tools out there. Look in http://www.agile-tools.net/ for some comparisons. I use xplanner at work where we coordinate requirements and work over iterations among several teams. It has its quirks but it generaly gets the work done and allows for some useful agile structure. I am sure some other will have preferences for more mature tools.
Trac (as Mark Roddy mentioned) is also nice, because it integrates a wiki, task and defect management, so it can be an interesting tool if you have none of those already in place.
I should say that we use Mantis now, but I wish it was better. I wish I could use it for customer-facing queries, I with I could open and assign issues by email.
ScrumWorks Pro looks promising, but amazingly expensive for me, with 15 developers.
AccuNote may be an option, but it is new to me
I'm using the customer support, project planning and issue management portions of OpenERP. Having your issues and feature requests, along with the tasks required to get them done on the same CRM that allows you to manage your customers is a big benefit.
I have used SourceGear Vault to manage all our software projects. Our business nature is very much driven by project basis - typically I have 5 active projects running at one period of time.
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Currently I'm working alone on a small project for University and I wondered: Does it make sense to apply methodologies (XP, Scrum) or parts of it? If only for experience? Or does it produce too much "overhead"? And if it does, which one would fit best?
Methodologies give the approach to tackling a development, to me it would still be applicable if there was one or 100 people on the project. The only difference as you being the sole developer would take on multiple roles within the development.
It's certainly an interesting idea to be able to sprint towards getting a set of goals done in a certain time. It might add some motivation to hitting a deadline, and preventing feature-bloat.
As any skill, project management side of development improves with practice, so I'd say it's worth trying out.
Worth noting that XP and Scrum are development methodologies not project management methodologies.
Development methodologies (such as XP and Scrum) govern areas such as requirements gathering, development techniques, testing and release.
Project management methodologies (such as PRINCE2) cover elements such as scheduling and planning, risk and issue management, project scoping and business case management.
But the accepted answer is right regardless. Unless you're the only person who will ever see the software, input into it, code on it or interact with it in any way at all, methodologies of both sorts will absolutely have something to offer and should be looked at. Even if you are the only person they can still be useful.
Some of this depends on where you intend to go with your work: you're working alone today, but are you planning (or at least hoping) to build something big enough that you will need help? If so, then it is good to get some practices in place upfront - not so much that it will slow you down, but something that you can build on when you create your team.
A colleague of mine, who has left architecting high-volume trading systems to build software for the iPod and iPad, has done some thinking about this now that he is a team of 1. You might find it helpful:
link text
If you are working alone, then pair programming may be a bit of a challenge. :) At the same time, having a story board and moving cards may be useful for others to see if they are connected to your project,e.g. end-users or project managers. My suggestion is to read up on various approaches and if it seems like it may work, do a trial and see how if it makes things better or not.
I have worked on projects by myself and you definitely need to play multiple roles. I'm a better developer now than before I worked on my own, and definitely I can integrate to any development team working with XP and Scrum since I made sure than when I worked by myself I would do the best practices XP and Scrum suggests.
The only thing you couldn't apply is pair programming. Besides that everything is possible playing multiple roles, it will enhance your development for sure.
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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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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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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.
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I are working in a small development team of 4 people.
We are trying develop "Agile style" - story points, small tasks, etc...
Unfortunately, we are currently managing our tasks in a (shared) excel table.
We looked at some available tools (Mingle, TFS, Scrum for Team System), but all of these looked like they would be too much overhead and take the fun out of working.
What are you Agile lovers using for tracking your tasks over long period of time?
Update
The current top answer is not really an answer to what I intended to ask - I need some tool to help me find out, over the long run, which features & tasks I estimated correctly, and where did I go horribly wrong. I see how a whiteboard/all of post-its help with managing the current or previous iterations, but I don't see myself searching for a post-it from 2 months ago.
Update Response: It doesn't seem imprortant to track WHAT was underestimated as much as WHY it was underestimated. This is something addressed at the iteration retrospective. If there are impediments, they should be addressed early and resolved. If you're looking to address something more specific than just seeing a task in the past that was undersetimated, you should ask about that.
A whiteboard, index cards and sharpies.
Just use Trac. It has everything you need for a small project. You could use the ticketing system to distribute the tasks (in Agile you should think in terms of stories and not individual tasks anyway) but if it's not enough you could get extra plugins for time management etc.
We're using Xplanner right now, with pretty good results.
Write them out on labels and stick them up on a board - it works :) Also Scrum really does not give you overhead - it works pretty well and is very satisfying for all team members imho :)
Here we use Trac for one project and #Task for another.
At another company, we used Excel sheets with each person's tasks, printed and pinned to the wall.
In general, most forms of actually planning, documenting, and tracking tasks is going to take the fun out of working... But it is completely necessary to stay sane.
I really like JIRA and the GreenHopper plugin looks to add some nice features.
"We looked at some available tools (Mingle, TFS, Scrum for Team System), but all of these looked like they would be too much overhead and take the fun out of working."
I can only suggest you give Mingle a real trial, it's amazing. My developers love it and so do I.
There is a small learning curve but it's so flexible, I'd suggest looking at the Hybrid sample project and the built-in reports to get over any reservations you may have.
Our project would be dead in the water if it wasn't for Mingle, I have a disability but can still modify 300+ cards in a day if required. Plus it's free for a year for 5 users or less!
Post-its cannot possibly facilitate the communication and teamwork that this software provides out of the box, and if you don't like the way it works you can keep tweaking it till it suits your team.
Hardware - I'd suggest a quad core & 8GB for decent performance.
Disclosure: I have no association with Thoughtworks, other than loving their s/ware.
Index cards work great, but if you need it online, I'd try Unfuddle. You can use it for small groups for free, and it's lightweight enough that you can adjust it to your group's needs pretty easily.
I use it at work, and we keep all stories in its "notebooks" (read: wikis) and tasks in its tasking system. It has built in milestones and releases, and its Subversion and Git integration are pretty great: we can log comments on and resolve tasks with version control messages.
We're using ScrumWorks for about 30 people. They have a free edition.
http://danube.com/scrumworks
I like Pivotal Tracker. It's a story-based project planning tool that allows teams to collaborate in real-time
Rally is a really nice tool that is focused around Agile development.
I like dotProject for actual task tracking. You can easily attack the database to get your on statistical data out of it if needen.
For the planning proces I use Microsoft Project mainly because I'm used to it. I also used the open source tool OpenProj.
Changing tasks in dotProject is painful, so I usually enter them only about 4 to 6 weeks in advance.
FogBuz seems to be a great tool, I just never had the time to try it out and am realla a late adopter of such tools.
This question is mostly a duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12328/what-bug-tracking-software-do-you-use which has a lot of answers - tasks are not necessarily bugs, but good tools let you specify other task types than 'bug'.
We're using Eventum at the moment to handle our tasks. It may not be the best but it's worth taking a look at. Each "issue" in our case is often broken down features or use cases that is assigned to someone to implement.
We also use Trac, but it does not scale very well. Handling Use Cases and Test Cases may also get cumbersome. It really depends on the scope of the project and the size of the development team. I think for teams with less than 10 people Trac does an excellent job, but after that you are hitting the glass ceiling.
We are starting to take a closer look at Confluence/Jira (perhaps with Greenhopper) as we are starting to outgrow Trac.
Oh, and post its, index cards and whiteboards work really well if everybody is on-site ;-)
RallyDev.com. Free 5-user community edition and it's actually pretty good!
For a co-located team nothing beats a big wall and a whole bunch of index cards as far as I'm concerned. Maybe with whiteboard or two for burnup/down charts.
We are a team spread across multiple locations. The tool I've found useful has been a wiki built over Twiki.
Benefits:
Wiki-like environment so collaboration is easy.
Plugins available to add 'applications' such as minutes of meetings, Bulletin Boards,
Discussion Forums.
Secure.
Check out Intervals. We built it as a web design agency with very similar issues as yours. We hadd 4 or 5 guys all tracking time and tasks in xcel documents and it was difficult to get anything done.
I the agile teams I work with, we dont manage task over a long period of time. Instead, we manage a "backlog" of features to be added to the product. We sometime also call those "user stories". This backlog is a kind of slicing of the product in a list of incremental features to be delivered. We manage this backlog in Excel, with very few columns such as description, complexity evaluation and done/not done, iteration, and that's it.
During the iteration, the tasks are managed in a postit wall as presented in one of the answers. In case a task last more than one iteration, we manage to fragment it, ensuring features/user stories are delivered at each iteration.
An example of user story in the excel backlog, it would have complexity associated with it:
"The user can log on the system using a form with id and password"
Some examples of associated tasks, to be done during an iteration. Those will be managed with postit, with not complexity.
"Code the logging form, using GWT"
"Implement security algorithm to check password validity"
"Create a user/password table in the database"
"Test the logging form on the integration system"
We've been using Accunote (accunote.com). A vendor set it up so I have no idea what it costs, or even if we are sing it properly.
Why it works:
Fairly easy to edit/update.
Easy to modifiy tasks in sprint, copy to/from backlog tab, etc.
Everyone looks at the burndown charts, especially the "by user" one, and that keeps the team working together and gives a sense of accomplishment.
There's probably other tools that do the same, or better (and the Accunote Javascript can be a bit awkward).
Key thing is that it should be really easy to use and have some sort of "team space" where you can all keep an eye on each other and see how each of you are going.