What software is available to organize software department with multiple products, people, projects?

Question

Our department develops a lot of different software programs by a lot of different people in the department. The problem is that we want some solution to:

1. Make it more visible what software program is maintained by which person.
2. See the state of a software program (maintained/obsolete/etc).
3. Attach some kind of charactistics (maybe tags) to software programs.
4. Possibly make references to projects that make use of the software program.

There is not a single programming environment (such as java or .net) that we use, it depends on the type of job and the experience of the developers involved. So we need a program or platform independent solution.

We are looking for some kind of web-based (preferably self-hosted, due to some confidentiality reasons) solution. Are there environments or products available to set things like this up or should we go and make some custom solution for this?

Answer 1

Maybe consider using some of 37Signals applications, perhaps in combination.

I think Backpack would start to fulfil you brief.

Answer 2

Some people use BugTracker.NET hosted internally as a project task backlog as well as bugs and feature requests. You can customise the look and feel easily and projects can have owners and it allows the creation of groups of people for assignment/notification.

It may not be the prettiest of tools, but it is free and works well in our experience.

Answer 3

My company uses Rally, and we generally like it. However, the tool assumes that you use an agile methodology of sorts. See http://www.rallydev.com/.

It manages multiple projects, defects, a feature back log, releases, iterations, and a number of other things.