On Mar 21, 2005, at 9:10 PM, Tracy R Reed wrote:
a bunch of projects to keep moving I am thinking maybe it would be acceptable to point my hair *just slightly* by employing some sort of project management software. Does anyone really find this stuff useful?
Too often, project management software is used once to plop down an outline of a project and produce some fancy Gantt charts to wave at management. And yes there are fat-client programs like Imendio and MrProject which can do that, and can also be used by a single individual to track a project's stages.
But what I'd recommend to you, for managing a team of developers, is something web-based that people can use collaboratively. If you build your task delegation, bug/incident handling, customer support and other internal processes around the project management website, then yes, it can be extremely useful.
You can take a look at some general web-based project management suites:
- http://www.dotproject.net/ - one of the most mature and polished OSS web-based suites available.
- http://taskware.sourceforge.net/ - very simple, task-oriented
- http://netoffice.sourceforge.net/ - well rounded software with the extra ability to expose portions of your internal project to clients as you see fit... you work inside the main interface, but generate special logins that give customized "portals" to clients who wish to watch how you're coming on their project and provide feedback.
And since you're doing software development, you may want to look into suites which are oriented specifically toward that usage:
- http://www.tutos.org/ - another old standby in the OSS project management scene, it's a mature product which focuses on managing software projects, including a bug tracker and the ability to attach patches and such to incidents
- http://www.pmtool.org/ - simpler than TUTOS, but still focused on bug/change requests and tracking developer time
Hope that helps! Let us know what you find that works for you.
-- Joshua Penix http://www.binarytribe.com Binary Tribe Linux Integration Services & Network Consulting
-- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
