What features might our team find lacking if we adopted Basecamp for bug tracking, task tracking, external documentation, collaboration, and project management?
I've used the free version before and think that 37Signals makes excellent products - but I wanted to hear from you what the drawbacks might be.
The last time I evaluated Basecamp I found one feature that was lacking was the ability to view workload or other information over several projects. For exmaple, if I wanted to find out if Developer X had too much stuff to do or was spread too thin over several projects I could not figure out how to do that.
For me the missing feature was the ability to store my development stories in a way that worked for me. I wanted a single template that I could use to generate every story and the ability to link stories together. Eventually, I ended up using a Wiki for this. I didn't really have any need for to-do lists or time tracking stuff (this is handled separately by a company-wide app).
I've been using BaseCamp for 2 years now and found it to be an excellent general project information portal. The ability to store documents, to-do tasks, and milestones with a living project view is pretty impressive.
Unfortunately their mantra of 'keep it simple' also has quite a few drawbacks in regards to capabilities:
Basecamp is a simplified task management tool that will work great if you are a freelancer. But small design & development teams may find it too little. You should also check out Intervals http://www.myintervals.com, which has a more comprehensive feature set for software development.
Task estimates vs actuals is a big issue I've noticed. Also being able to mark tiem as billed would be a nice feature it currnetly lacks.
It's hard to manage own documentation. Writeboards doesn't give you a good way of formatting your code and becomes unmanageable one you got more than 10 in a project. Message/Files gets messy if you got to many.
You can not export your files, they do not provide file api even.
So if you go out, you will get some work to take your files.
Recently I was helping a client to move 50 projects from Basecamp to Assembla. They said Assembla is better for project management and it has more features.
For me the missing feature was the ability to store my development stories in a way that worked for me. I wanted a single template that I could use to generate every story and the ability to link stories together. Eventually, I ended up using a Wiki for this. I didn't really have any need for to-do lists or time tracking stuff (this is handled separately by a company-wide app).