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381

answers:

4

I'm working on a project that has components, components have features, features have bugs. I can't organise these tickets tidily. What kind of tool do you use to keep these things in order?

I'm using Eclipse PDT + mylyn. This tool described above should:

  • be centralized, mulitple programmer/machine should read the same tasks.
  • support subtasks, in order to organise my tickects, assign features to components and so on.
  • cheap enough for personal use
  • have mylyn connector. Because of this point, the options are very limited.

So the point of my question again:
How do you organise your tasks?

+1  A: 

We use trac at our workplace for developer PM, and its worked good for us. We also set-upped the agilo plugin for trac.

solomongaby
I'm using trac now, how do you track related tickets/features?
erenon
I don't think Trac supports ticket relations (apart from linking a ticket to a milestone). Redmine does support all kinds of ticket relations as explained in short in my answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2161872/how-do-you-organise-your-tasks-related-to-a-single-project/2168168#2168168
Aron Rotteveel
we use components for the purpose of relating tickets to a feature
solomongaby
+2  A: 

I use a combination of two methods, one to track the feature requested for project by the "client", one to tracks bugs and tasks.

I used both scumworks and custom excel sheets + white board to track features and their subtasks. Hard to tell which I prefer, I adapt to my team on this. The paper gives more ownership to the team, and excel does the job for the backlog. Scrumworks is a nice a application, nice to manage backlog, display a pretty board that is very intuitive for the team, much faster for the managing stuff (ex: stats), not expensive as well.

I use devtrack, which is a bug tracking system to track everything else. I use this one but many other bugtracking system do the same. Where it becomes interesting is that we use it to track much more than bugs. In one unified system, we track small tasks and bugs, but also art asset integration, audio integration, effects integration, cutscene integration etc. The trick is to have a way to make a custom flow and then a task can travel from one department to another into the predefined order, everything get tracked, nothing is lost, and it is easy for the people because it is centralized. I like devtrack because of the easy user interface, and the control we have over the flow, transition, access, the ability to link tasks into hierarchy. I heard it is quite expensive, but look out for those qualities when choosing a tracking system.

The most important thing is to be able to adapt your tracking method and not get stuck with one when things change. I use a combination of tool, but this change along the project, in the beginning of a project I use almost exclusively agile tracking type, but when closing on to the end, a database with good tracking becomes better for my team. The combination gives us the best of both world, flexibility for what needs it, and strict tracking for everything else.

MissT
Thanks for the well explained answer, I'll take a look at those projects. I'm intersted in this "combination" thing.
erenon
+1  A: 

It sounds like less of project management and more of release management. Personally, I'd suggest Trac or Assembla as they're both centered around the concept of tickets that you can group into Milestones. That way you can keep a handle on the dependencies without having most of the overhead of a standard PM system... and even have tickets that don't relate to any particular milestone.

CaseySoftware
I'm using Trac right now, but I miss the "relations between tickets" feature. I'll take a look at Assembla.
erenon
+1  A: 

We use Redmine. We have previously used Trac, but have found Redmine to be much more intuitive, flexible and user-friendly.

It supports easy creation of new projects without the need to perform any command-line tasks and has a much more steady flow of updates than Trac.

As for the exact answer to your questions related to Redmine:

  • be centralized, mulitple programmer/machine should read the same tasks.
    • Redmine is a centralized and supports easy creation of multiple users with ACL's.
  • support subtasks, in order to organise my tickects, assign features to components and so on.
    • Redmine supports projects, subprojects, tracker categories, versions.
    • Subtasks are not available out of the box (yet), but there is some community patching being done to make this possible.
  • cheap enough to personal use
    • It's free. All you need is a server and Ruby running on it.
  • have mylyn connector. Becouse of this point, the options are very limited.

A small summary from the Redmine home page:

Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database.

Redmine is open source and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL).

Overview

  • Multiple projects support
  • Flexible role based access control
  • Flexible issue tracking system
  • Gantt chart and calendar
  • News, documents & files management
  • Feeds & email notifications
  • Per project wiki
  • Per project forums
  • Time tracking
  • Custom fields for issues, time-entries, projects and users
  • SCM integration (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs)
  • Issue creation via email
  • Multiple LDAP authentication support
  • User self-registration support
  • Multilanguage support
  • Multiple databases support

Oh, and did I mention migrating your system from Trac to Redmine is incredibly easy?

Aron Rotteveel
Well explained, thanks.
erenon