Great post Roy. Thanks. To respond to the original question, I have used Redmine with Subversion and would say that it works well. I am not necessarily recommending it above other tools, but it has a good UI, is fairly intuitive, and I have no major complaints about it.
-Mike Chabot On Dec 21, 2007 10:45 PM, Roy Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Project/Code Management Software > We've been running a SVN pull of Trac 0.11 for quite some time now, ever > since the week after the planned launch date for 0.11. One of our biggest > problems after starting to rely on it for all of our development time-lines > and bugs is that tickets were "getting lost", since we use the multiple > project (pretty much a must have for SVN). As a result in a busy day it's > hard to keep "trac" of small tickets coming in from our project manager. > They would sometimes go missing for a week (BAD)... Which essentially > defeated the whole point of trac in the first place, to eliminate the guess > work and reduce the communicate needed. > > Trac Customizations ( Multiple project overview ) > So I customized the splash screen to give us an overview of where the > project stood, how many tickets were opened/closed and if there were any > critical tickets at all. You can take a look at the interface at you just > won't be able to look at the projects. If you guys like this let me know and > I'll submit a patch for a suggested feature, I just added some code to the > function that does the overview page (finally got my $$$ from that python > course in college). > http://empirestaging.com:8500/ > > Project / Trac Workflow > But just having trac installed doesn't really tell the story of how we use > it. We use SVN for source control. But the business rules were for us the > hardest to work out. So here is what I came-up with for our group: > > Project Setup > * a new project comes along, ant scripts fired to create skeleton code, > create SVN, create Trac, create IIS, and check-in initial code > * all the requirement documents, mock-ups etc are added to the base wiki > page in Trac > * initial project setup milestones in week intervals, fill those milestones > with tickets for the week > * all tasks are placed into small tickets usually 4-8 hours a piece. > (read: XP user stories), small for us because we do web-projects > * each milestone has an estimate finish date (the day after the actual due > date because that's how trac works) > * milestones are labeled with the week of completion > * each ticket's hour estimate is placed in the title (this is our weakest > link by far) > * developers pull a local copy to their development machine, run ANT scripts > to setup IIS locally > > Project Workflow > * any tickets that don't get finish in that milestones are reviewed and and > reshuffle the rest of the tickets > * Timeline is generated base on the tickets accordingly. This review happen > every monday morning > * every svn check in should be tied to a ticket, so we use the fixes, refs > svn hooks to monitor this > * there is a pre-commit hook that ensures it's at least has a comment > * 'updated the login script. fixes #214' would be a sample commit comment > * http://trac.edgewall.org/browser/trunk/contrib/svn-trac-hook?rev=294 > * bugs are filed in a maintenance milestone and each milestone is tested on > the following Monday and any related bugs are addressed from the previous > milestone on monday/tuesday > * all maintenance for the company overall (past projects, small upgrades) > are managed in our company milestones > * Use cruisecontrol.net SVN plug-in to poll every minute to see if there > was a svn commit. it then checks out the latest code, > * runs init=true scripts, etc to refresh the code base... (still missing > automated reactor cleanup) > * also missing is the automated unit/functional selenium test auto-run > * http://ccnet.thoughtworks.com/ > * Any issues or install scripts that need to be done are noted in the > 'project release notes' section in the project wiki > > Our project manager then uses the timelines in trac and estimates to layout > a chart of the projects that are currently in development and that are > coming up. > > Trac Review > After using it for several months (although I don't have custom workflows, > my three biggest downfalls were. > 1*. estimate VS. actual reporting. There are several plug-ins available that > I'm still evaluating, but the biggest problem for us so far was estimating > xx hours and taking xx hours. If I could get mylyn and the plug-in to work > together, we would be golden. > 2. multiple project overview (which I patched in a view for that) > 3. Re-shuffling tickets is a PAIN. If you quickly want to re-evaluate, > re-assign or shift around tickets you have to open them up, click around, > re-assign go back to query... if there was a quick view or drag-drop this > would save us a lot of time. > > *This is our biggest 'complaint' or issue so far. Since we just have to take > a look back every week (about 10+ minutes a week is lost determining this). > > Project/Programmer Velocity > I read this quite some time ago in the extreme programmer series but never > took it to heart... you should! Basically determine how many productive > hours you get from you or your developers each week. If you don't know take > what you think you do and divide it by three (in the book). Because you'll > have a million other things come up. Then plan your milestones accordingly. > review at the end of each one, and readjust your tickets (or stories) > accordingly. > > Hour / Billing Tracking > We separately use Harvest for our billing/tracking of hours to our clients. > This has been a truely amazing service, and with desktop widgets it couldn't > get any easier. It does all the estimated budget vs. actual that we couldn't > get out of Trac. check these guys out > http://www.getharvest.com/ > > MyLyn > I use mylyn personally but haven't written it up for my co-workers. > Unfortunately I haven't found a way for it to work with the multi-project > without disabling multiple logins with Trac/SVN. If you know of a way in > trac 0.11 PLEASE let me know, this would be great to get all my co-workers > on board with this... Either way, it's still a great idea and very > effective. > > Other Suggestions / Options > We used IBM Rational series for a test drive for a while. If you're a large > shop that can handle the $$$ this is by far my favorite tool. I used others > at Intel before, but this was great. The price was WAY out of our price > range however. I will look at the other tools and see if we can't benefit > from those. > > Feedback > Please let me know any feedback you might have on the process I mentioned > above. If you see it and like it or hate it let me know because I haven't > gotten a real chance to explain it in depth to the community at large. > > Thanks, > Roy --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CFCDev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cfcdev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
