Tools for a lone developer setup?

Question

I'm a lone developer who would like to get some structure to my projects. My hardware setup is a laptop running windows XP and a desktop running Ubuntu that acts as a storage server.

I currently use Mercurial as my source control system with my working copy of the repository stored on my laptop and clone the repository to the Ubuntu machine every couple of days as a backup.

What other tools would you recommend for a lone developer to do things such as bug tracking, project planning, etc? I'm looking for something simple that either has to run on windows or as a web app on Apache.

Answer 1

I like Redmine. It supports several SCM systems, and provides a lot of nice features :) It's a RoR app, and is quite easy to set up in ubuntu,

Answer 2

Mantis bug tracking is interesting, with a workflow you can easily customize.

Answer 3

I use a simple line-based journal into which I can record tasks, bugs, and subtasks. I display them chronologically, and can mark things as finished. It's integrated into my IDE (Eclipse) so I can directly associate line items with specific lines or source bits.

I know some people use Mylyn (via Eclipse) to indiviudaly interact with a bug-report system.

Don't get me wrong, proper issue-tracking is vital for collaborative projects, but for many smaller projects, it can sometimes be a significant overkill.

Answer 4

Give FogBuz a try. It has a plenty of features and free to use for up to two developers. A mind mapping software like Freemind is also good for brainstorming.

Answer 5

I'm an alone wolf as well and for project management + bug tracking + todo I use todolist. It's great. Little, support lots of stuff, easy and useful.

Answer 6

Request Tracker is my personal fave. There's an O'Reilly book on it available, too.

I think you also need a wiki, for which you want MediaWiki.

Answer 7

I'm my last job we were fans of Trac. It has a bug tracker and a wiki for documentation fully integrated, you can reference bugs by id in the wiki system and wiki pages in the bug system. It runs on various Linux distributions, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD and MS Windows.

Answer 8

You might want to check out Axosoft's OnTime. We use the paid version, but a single user install is free! It is a full blown requirements management, bug tracking, wiki hosting, support ticket tracking system and a whole host of other features. We have been using it for a year now in production and we track everything in it.

It runs on Windows and you can use MS-SQL Express (I believe) which is also free. I think for a lone programmer, this gives you a lot of functionality for the price and it's easy to install and manage. Good luck!

Answer 9

Try Mylyn or Tasktop for accessing your bug tracker and managing your issues/tasks. If you've set up a compatible bug/issue tracker, you can access it on your desktop via Tasktop to streamline your workflow. If you haven't set up an issue tracker, you can use local tasks to track your work.