What Are Basic Tools For A New Project?

Question

For a long time, I thought that to start a new project we only need 3 basic tools. 1) A Build System (e.g. Maven & CruiseControl) 2) A Version Control System (e.g. CVS & SVN & GIT) 3) A Bug Tracking System (e.g. Bugzilla)

Yesterday, a senior guy told me that we need at least one thing more. That is KPI(Key Performance Index). Without KPI, it is impossible to measure whether the project is progressing well or not.

KPI is kind of SOFT tool compared to Maven/SVN/Bugzilla. I believe since I missed SOFT tools, there must be some other kind of tools I missed. So, anybody get some ideas what other basic tools necessary for a new project?

Answer 1

A project management tool for team members, customers or users.

One of the most important parts is interacting with people, a project management tool allows you show the progress/milstone and organized the feature request, defect and resources along with other features like forum, nofications and document uploading. This gives your customer a clear view of the project.

Redmine works very well for me.

Answer 2

We've found a wiki to be invaluable for recording specs, designs, thoughts, questions, and just about any other "living" information we need to remember.

Atlassian offers Confluence, a very inexpensive ($1200) web-based wiki that just worked for us out of the box. It's very customizable but took almost zero effort for us to start using it. There's a great deal of community support (they use their own tool), and many plug-ins are available. Download from http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ConfluenceDownloadCenter.jspa or try it online at http://confluence.demo.atlassian.com/display/ds/Confluence+Overview.

I do not work for Atlassian; I'm just a very satisfied customer!

Answer 3

The human can be one of the biggest factors when creating a project that sometimes people (sadly) overlook. If the human side isn't up to scratch then the project won't always reach is full potential.

Lots of tools exist, forums, mail lists ect. They all are paramount if you want to make a good project where everyone can work and feel part of the development community where everyone knows the over all goal and where the project as a whole is headed at all times.