Project tracking/management tool

Question

Which project tracking tool do you use?
Does it allow programmers to bill hours worked to projects/tasks?
Does it allow to track items promised vs. items delivered?
Does it allow to forecast personnel needs when you have only a ballpark estimate of how many hours you are going to need for different task types?
Does it integrate with your bug tracker? [Mantis]
Does it integrate with your source control tool? [Subversion]
Does it allow you to easily publish your schedule and current priorities to team members?
Does it produce reports on any or all of the above?

Am I even right in calling a tool that does those things a "Project tracking/management tool"?

What does your tool have that makes you love it and use it every day?

I don't really care about Gantt charts. I find Microsoft Project quite clunky for this needs (although I'm hardly an expert user).

Answer 1

We use Version One. It's designed to organize agile (esp. Scrum and XP) projects. Doesn't integrate with much, but it has an API. Let's you sort your user stories by priority, shuffle out work, and track progress against it.

Answer 2

FogBugz is a good system that meets most (perhaps all) of your listed features, and many more. The nice thing is that it integrates features your programmers would use daily, so it doesn't seem like an extra burden to start a time card program - you just work from here. You get your tasks, bugs, customer communications, time, estimates, etc.

Answer 3

I also use FogBugz. For small projects (less then 2 people) they have a free hosted version.

Answer 4

Matt, they don't advertise it for some reason but here is how you get it:

Sign up for the FogBugz on Demand 45 day trial account. Then in your settings choose "Your FogBugz On Demand Account".

About half way down that page is a link to switch your account to the "Student and Startup Edition)" which allows you to have up to 2 users for free, with no expiration.

Answer 5

One caveat about FogBugz: It's next to impossible to get timesheets for individual programmers. You can only do it case by case.

This IMO is the biggest drawback of FogBugz.

ETA: You can get your own timesheet. But not the timesheet of others. Also you cannot get the amount of time spent on a project over a given period of time. This makes it very hard to use FogBugz as your main project management app - you can't easily get information from FogBugz to use for billing.

Answer 6

A nice simple free task management tool is ToDoList which can do most of what you asked in your questions (it also has a bunch of add-ins.) It is available for download at CodeProject.

Answer 7

I can second Fogbugz. It's kinda expensive, but so far it's really worth it.

We also use Lighthouse internally (evaluating it on another project), but afaik it doesn't allow you to enter the time worked etc. in order to bill for hours. What's nice though is, Lighthouse is very easy to use and they offer an API as well which allows you to extend it so e.g. you can integrate it with a timetracker, or whatever.

Another application we use is Cerberus Helpdesk. It's less of a project management tool and used for support. I guess you could do PM in it too, but that wouldn't be as straight forward. I'm not so sure if it's still state of the art since we've run into many issues, but it seems to be one of the best PHP based helpdesks still. We host it on our own servers and it allows you to enter the time you worked on tickets, so if that is what you are after primarily, I'd give it a try. It's also CRM light since it allows you to add customers and you can get a report for basically everything. If you get the license, everything but the email parser (afaik) is open source (not free, but the source code is "readable"), which means that you can extend it easily.

If you are looking for a free options, there are probably gazillions. Do a search on Sourceforge for starters. One tool I can recommend is streber-pm. PHP(5) based as well and it needs a MySQL database. It works very well. :)

Answer 8

I am a fan of ProjectPier, it started out as an attempt to create a clone of BaseCamp, which is also a very good system (especially if you don't mind having it 'cloud'-based). ProjectPier is a bit more limited, but a recent patch allows you to add timetracking.

BaseCamp is great if you want to have something fully-featured, and seems to have a lot of third-party plugins that utilize its API also.

Answer 9

No surprise that we are discussing FogBugz, given the history of this site!

FogBugz is a good tool for software development project management, but it is unabashedly programmer-centric, and doesn't necessarily adapt well to things too far from software development. I evaluated it for use to help manage overall IT function for a company and found it had some holes.

I believe the absence of "management"/"productivity"/"monitoring" tools in FogBugz is completely intentional. If the project management system is used for evaluating programmers, programmers will not be honest with the project management system and will instead "game" it so they look better. Such a lack of honesty defeats the primary purpose of FogBugz. I also think the concept of using his software to be big brother offends Mr. Spolsky, who has written a great deal about the care and feeding of programmers.

Answer 10

Which project tracking tool do you use? dotProject

Does it allow programmers to bill hours worked to projects/tasks? yes

Does it allow to track items promised vs. items delivered? yes

Does it allow to forecast personnel needs when you have only a ballpark estimate of how many hours you are going to need for different task types? you can change dynamic tasks as you go

Does it integrate with your bug tracker? With add-ins it can integrate with mantis

Does it integrate with your source control tool? Not with our Sourcegear Vault

Does it allow you to easily publish your schedule and current priorities to team members? yes, with reports or they can view it directly

Does it produce reports on any or all of the above? It does have several reports

• The tasks allocated to each user
• How many hours a user has allocated in the specified period of time
• Tasks currently overdue
• The amount of hours worked by a user against those allocated in tasks
• The Projects Task List
• The user task logs
• Tasks completed in the last week
• Tasks to be completed in next week
• Project Statistics, describing task statuses
• View the task's end date (real and theoretical)
• Overall snapshot of all projects

Am I even right in calling a tool that does those things a "Project tracking/management tool"? you are correct

What does your tool have that makes you love it and use it every day? For me, it is the gantt charts.

Answer 11

I built my own simple system and it works ok for me. I am very interested in project management type software and looked at dozens of them. One thing I realized is that while they all do about the same thing there is no one best system. It's like CMSes. There are tons of CMSes but people still build their own because they can't find one that does what they want.

Answer 12

We use Jira that is mainly a BUG tracker plus time/resource planning. It lets programmers log their work and all this data can be used to draw charts or tables which are valuable to managers.

It is highly extensible through plugins written in Java.

Answer 13

We are using our own in-house projectmanagement tool for everything except bugtracking which we are using BugTracker.net from Codeplex.

Why we are using a own projectmanagement tool and not a existing one, i have no clue since it is was the bosses that wanted it and not someone else application.

Answer 14

Check out CounterSoft Gemini.

It's ASP.NET based and even our clients use it to "talk" to us!

I think it's free for 5 users.

Answer 15

Nobody seems to have mentioned Redmine. It is a simple yet rather complete forge-like software in which you can have projects and sub-projects with BTS, time-tracking, version planning, fora for discussions and so on. Check this other topic too.

Answer 16

Trac is an awesome tool, with many add-ons that will provide the functionality you need.

Answer 17

Check out PlanningForce's Project Planning tool. Hope it might help you.

Happy Holidays !!!

Answer 18

We use Intervals

Does it allow programmers to bill hours worked to projects/tasks? Yes.

Does it allow to track items promised vs. items delivered? Not explicitely, though you could get it to work.

Does it allow to forecast personnel needs when you have only a ballpark estimate of how many hours you are going to need for different task types? No. But you can use the reports to estimate how much time you will need.

Does it integrate with your bug tracker? [Mantis] It includes task management styled after a bug tracker (status, priority, etc), so yeah.

Does it integrate with your source control tool? [Subversion] No.

Does it allow you to easily publish your schedule and current priorities to team members? No.

Does it produce reports on any or all of the above? Yes.

Am I even right in calling a tool that does those things a "Project tracking/management tool"? Yeah, that is exactly what we call Intervals.

What does your tool have that makes you love it and use it every day? It couples time tracking with task & project management, so we know exactly where our time is going. And we can use the reports to justify our time to clients.

I don't really care about Gantt charts. I find Microsoft Project quite clunky for this needs (although I'm hardly an expert user). Intervals doesn't really care about Gantt charts, either. :)

Answer 19

I recommend Excel - allows for great flexibility

Answer 20

eSoftHead recently deliver the new project management module in its enterprise groupware product. You can check it at http://blog.esofthead.com/engroup-1-5-1-released/ and download product at http://esofthead.com/node/25. It is totally free !

Answer 21

JIRA really works for me especially with the Greenhopper plug in. I also find it useful to record the basics relating to the requirements and in that way reducing the requirements documents needed.

Answer 22

I would recommand PlanningForce Express Premium, a project planning software for small teams which is a real Microsoft project alternative: cheaper and more efficient!

Answer 23

Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com) is pretty great for a lot of this, especially in a more agile environment.

Answer 24

I have used MS Project 2007 for managing multiple projects. It has different tools available for project planning, tracking project progress and change management. Check benefits of ms project 2007 for more details, http://www.microsoft.com/project/en/us/project-pro-benefits.aspx It offers the best project management solutions.

Answer 25

Hey now latest version of Microsoft project is available. So you can try ms project 2010 for project management. Check this for more details on Microsoft project 2010

Answer 26

We are doing our daily work with a ProjectForge http://labs.micromata.de/display/pf/Home JIRA combo, this works great.

Answer 27

We use VisionProject. The good thing is that it has all these things built in. We actually replaced Mantis and our IT HelpDesk when we bought this system. The best thing is that we found it very easy to work with, even though it has so much functionality.

Answer 28

Nice to see a good list of features needed. I installed VisionProject this spring and am really happy with it. It covers everything in your list, but we actually replaced our bug tracker as well since a bug tracker is included in the system. This is, I believe, one of the only systems on the market that has 4 systems in 1 (Bug/Issue Tracker, Helpdesk, Project Management, Document Management). Of course it has Time Management as well, but I see that as included in the others.