Collaboration/management tools for programming shop?

Question

This is not a programming question, but I figured I would ask in here, since there are a lot of professional coders. Let me know if you have any suggestion on the software we could use to manage a technical department.

I currently work for programming shop, employing about 30 people. We have different software products that we provide to our clients, and we do a lot of customizing, leading to a lot of billable work, projects, testing....

Currently, most of our internal tools to manage the technical department consist of Excel spreadsheets, word documents, and buggy apps thrown together by the devs in their spare time. With the recent rapid growth of the company, these ways of managing the technical department are becoming ineffective.

The layout of the technical department is like so:

• Products Dev groups (there is a manager, team leader, and several devs for each product)

  • Product 1 Dev Group
  • Product 2 Dev Group
  • Product 3 Dev Group
  • Product 4 Dev Group

• DBA Group

• Network/Systems Administrators

• Quality Assurance/Testing group

• Technical Support group

We already established that we will be implementing Request Tracker (RT) for Problem tickets, bugs, technical support tasks. We will also implement Litmus (from mozilla) to help standardize software testing scripts.

We are looking for Groupware/Collaboration software that have the following features, to improve communications and efficiency between all technical groups:

• Quote Generation/Management
• Project Management
• Time Entry (Employees can submit billable time for work specific to project/clients)
• Change Management
• Document Management
• Wiki

Requirements:

Needs to be Open Source Web applications Run on Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP (No Java) and other open source technologies. Web Services API to tie in with other applications. Have a sizable community (ie, forums, user contributed plugins/modules, project not going to die soon)

If you have any comments or suggestions that might help, please let me know.

Answer 1

Are you doing Unit Testing in your development? That is something to look at as well as Continuous Integration tools. I assume you are using a version control system like CVS, SVN, or what have you. I see you're using RT, so I would just say I've only used that on one job but I thought it was a solid product.

Answer 2

Take a look at the Atlassian suite of tools.

Answer 3

I've been looking at open source pm tools for some time, most of them (the ones that are purely open source and not dumbed down free versions used to lure people to buying the higher end ones) - are for the most part simple and not stable (check itprojectguide.org for a list). Unless you're looking for an higher end tool (aka costly) - then I would suggest taking a close look at Google Docs - which will provide a collaborative environment for many of your needs...basic but effective.

Answer 4

While not Open-Source, FogBugz could fill your needs.

Answer 5

Check out Intervals. It's a web-based tool built by our web design & development agency, Pelago. We've been doing web-based software development for nine years now and have tried to distill as much of that experience as we could into an online tool.

It doesn't have a wiki, but it does have other collaborative features like document sharing. ALso, the time tracking and task management are combined, so you can do all your issue tracking and productivity management in one place.

Answer 6

Take a look at :

• Mantis
• dotProject

Both Open Source and LAMP, and I think there was even a plugin or something in order to integrate Mantis into dotProject