Number of tools designed for project management that currently exist in this world is enormous. Project management tools has document management system, milestones, meetings, several methods of communication (messages, email’s, video calls, etc.), and the possibility to correspond with your clients (which is often essential).
To successfully evaluate some of the tools, it is absolutely necessary to understand that there is no tool which is designed to support the absolute needs of all the possible industries that exist. Since we are on the IT highway, I’ll try to describe the above tools from the perspective of software development.
basecamp
I don’t think I should spend time explaining you about the popularity of a basecamp. The reason for this popularity lies in the absolute simplicity of it’s use. According to the authors themselves, basecamp is designed as a tool for project management for designers. For this reason they tried to be as simple as possible tool to use. Its greatest power lies in the ultra-simple messaging system. Each message is in fact a post on the forum, where participants in the conversation leave their comments and documents.
In addition to the messaging system, basecamp has options for creating and milestone, tasks, tracking time and writeboard. Writeboard is their version of the wiki pages. Although not a classic wiki, final purpose is the same. Since such software tool is not very useful to a software developer (or at least I do not see how it is) I will not describe it further here, see by yourself what writeboard actually is.
The biggest flaw from software development perspective is the lack of support for version control, lack of bug-tracking and general lack is the calendar. However the calendar can easily be compensated by some other solutions, again, the impression is that calendar should be part of it.
Conclusion: basecamp is the ideal tool for managing design projects, possibly marketing, and for excellent communication with clients that don’t have advanced knowledge in IT.
The solution that we at the E-75 are currently using is GForge advanced server. This tool absolutely satisfies most of the needs in software development. It allow you to create your own tracker where you can define your fields and their values, plus default tracker set will be enough for 90% of the needs. For each project you have a special forum, the basic document management, news section, wiki, subversion, build system (Cruise Control is used) and perhaps the strongest trump card – generating reports.
GForge Advanced Server
I’ll describe a few important things that contributed the most to a decision to use GForge here at E-75. The first thing is the great task tracking system. GForge by default offering most popular trackers such as to-do, bugs, patches, support, feature requests, plus you can create your own. Also, for each tracker, you can add fields that you need (e.g. field for time estimates). Another important thing for us was the connecting task from the tracker with SVN commits. Each commit is simply connected to the task so that each code change is easier to follow and we know exactly why and when changes were made.
Tasks have very nice time tracking option. However, there is a bug – rounding of 30 minutes is not exactly accurate and time gets lost. Another good thing for the intractable and lazy developers is the ability to define the workflow for the task status. I believe that everyone are aware of problems with discipline when using these tools, where developers simply ignore requests for accurate status updates of their assigned tasks. These workflows will force developers to keep up with the rules.
Another thing that we were excited about GForge when we start evaluating it is report generation. There is a standard set of reports, and you can add your own if necessary. Some of the most important reports for us are downloads report, a road map, tracker report and time tracking report.
Maybe for some of you it does not really matter, but GForge has a release management, which can be very useful when working on a project that has an active development after its initial release.
Like any software, even this is not without flaws. Besides small bugs (which in turn, knows to be irritating), it lacks a centralized calendar. Tasks management by e-mail is supported, but it takes a little bit of time to set it up properly. Learning curve may be a little longer, but for larger projects is certainly worth it. For smaller projects (a few months, one developer, etc.). this is overkill. There is too much “bureaucracy”, that a small team or small project will ever need.
Conclusion: excellent tool for large software projects, medium and large teams – others, find something simpler, don’t make your life more complicated than it is.
Trac & Subversion
Those who are familiar with the Trac knows that without Subversion it is just a toy. Together, they form a serious player in the field of project management tool. Trac is characterized by the simplicity of its interface. Pleasant for the eye, developers can easily adapt themselves to work with it. Since it is open source, you can modify it as desired to make it work as you need.
trac & subversion
Trac has a wiki page (does anyone use wiki pages? I am wondering, whether anyone reads those pages at all?), road map, milestones and ticket system – similar to task list in GForge. Ticket can be related to a milestone, which contributes to easier tasks and bugs monitoring.
Subversion can be integrated with it, which means you can use trac svn browser, and the commits can be linked with appropriate tickets. As I said, that option is one of the most important things, because it makes code change tracing much easier.
Trac also has report generation, but there is one major problem. It is not possible as in GForge, to use a simple interface to make a report. Instead, you need to be almost a hacker to accomplish this task. Ok, I know, it is for developers, etc., but to be forced to write some kind of SQL code and read bunch of literature to find out what’s in it, for me, it is unusable, regardless of the fantastic reports that you can make (you can even configure the color output, if you know CSS).
There is no automated build, there is no document management, no forums, no release management – yet, for a long time it was good enough for the 10 projects that I managed with it.
Conclusion: Trac & Subversion is a great software tool for small teams and small projects. Also, it is excellent tool for learning and perfect tool for school projects.
Which is best? Obviously, all three described tools are very useful. Each dominant in its field, you just need to know where you belong. Each of them dominate in their domains, you just need to know where you belong.
