Issue tracking for better projects
It doesn’t really matter how small your projects are, they are probably going to get bigger than you think, and soon enough, another project will come along and you’ll need to look after that one…
And then what happens? Maybe another project, and another… and pretty soon things get forgotten and then where are you? In trouble probably…
It’s a common topic, productivity boosting, you may have heard of Getting Things Done… you may have some sort of system that you can personally rely on to manage your time and make sure that you and perhaps your whole team, or maybe your organisation can co-operate efficiently and simply.
Or then again, maybe, like many people and organisations you and your colleagues are working on a patchwork of systems, some of which are… hmm… let’s say, not so much, no… not good.
I’ve encouraged development teams to use one sort of issue tracking package or another over the last few years, Bugzilla, Jira, Trac and more recently Redmine. Redmine is a fairly new kid on the block compared to the other products, but it’s looking very promising.
It doesn’t really matter what you use, because it’s really about how well you can engineer (socially and technically) the product you decide to use. If you have a strong Eclipse / Flex Builder presence in your team then Trac, Bugzilla and Jira are all very nice due to the Mylyn integration. Mylyn is a sweet Eclipse plugin which really helps to keep developers linked up to the project tracking system, updates and new issues assigned to a developer will pop up as small notifications, and updating an issue is linked directly from the Eclipse platform. Perhaps I’ll post some more info on mylyn another time.
Sadly, Redmine doesn’t have much in the way of external interfacing to assist in workflow, but because of it’s slick interface and very rich feature set, it’s a very compelling choice too. However if you really need integration through Email or Mylyn or another external tool then go with Trac, Jira or maybe Bugzilla - I suggest you keep your eyes on Redmine too, because there’s a lot of development happening.
If you have yet to get up and running with a project tracker, it’s worth your while getting a Redmine installation up and running and giving it a try. (I’d recommend the stable.0.7 branch) - but check the Redmine site for the latest development info.