Life Cycle Tools Suite

Question

I am looking to replace the life cycle tools currently used by my development teams. Tools that I'm looking for:

• Version Control
• Defect/Issue Tracking
• Requirements Tracking
• Test Case Management
• (potentially) Project Management: Project Status, hours entry

I have a new beefy server (Windows 2008 Server) to run all tools on. I'm looking at COTS and Open Source options, but haven't decided so far.

Other factors:

• Distributed team (different physical sites)
• Some Windows Development, some Linux Development
• Software, Firmware, Technical Writing need to be able to use it

Recommendations on a good suite that will work together?
If Open Source, best approach to run on the Windows 2008 Server?

Answer 1

Svn/Trac plus a few plugins will probably get you most of the way there for free.

If you use the version supplied by visualsvn (they bundle both trac and subversion) its a nice easy setup too.

http://www.visualsvn.com/server/ http://trac.edgewall.org/ http://trac-hacks.org/

Answer 2

Have a look at the tools by Atlassian- http://www.atlassian.com/ we've used some of their products (Jira/Confluence) and they link together well. Not exactly expensive either.

As an admin / Wiki gardener they are easy to use and manage, which can sometimes be an important over looked requirement.

Answer 3

Most common choice for version control system is Subversion. It has good tool support, most tools work with Subversion out of the box.

You have a distributed team so you might consider a distributed version control system. For example Mercurial or Git. Mercurial has better support on Windows. Tool support is bit lacking compared to "traditional" version control systems like Subversion.

All of the above are open source.

For project management/issue tracking/requirements tracking there is open source Trac which is combined issue tracker, project management software and wiki. Trac work with Subversion, Git and Mercurial.

Atlassian provides commercial JIRA for issue tracking/project management and Confluence for wiki. Jira works at least with Subversion.

Fog Creek has Mercurial based Kiln for version control and FogBugz for issue tracking/project management. Both commercial. Both are available as hosted and as run-on-your-own-server versions.

I have used Trac, which works, but you can expect some tinkering and configuration before it work like you want it to work.