Ask YC: What do you use for Project Management?
I've been fighting with Microsoft Project all day and I'm getting fed up. What does everybody use for project management? We do Agile development.
If you're a small enough team, you can also get by with a notebook or stickie notes. At my last job I just used a 5x8" spiral notebook, wrote down tasks when my boss asked, and checked them off when I was done.
It's kinda ironic that I've got a more formal process with my one-developer startup than at my last job, but I found that I needed to write lots of little design notes on each feature and cross-reference them as I was implementing. Flipping through pages is a real pain. Plus, it's really satisfying to just say "fixes #11" in a commit message and have the ticket automatically closed.
We use a scrum-like backlog methodology based on ROI: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122203
At some jobs, I've used very complicated spreadsheets for this method (to track dependency costs, etc), but lately Google spreadsheet works pretty well for individual assignments and status. There are some Scrum-based software solutions out there that somewhat support this approach. (e.g. http://www.acunote.com ) There's also a scrum plugin somewhere for Microsoft Project, but I haven't used that either.
It depends on the size of your group, probably, what will work for you. Also it depends on the size of the upward corporate group that needs reporting.
Their site's at http://live.gnome.org/Planner if you like, but I don't think it's available for windows.
It's a bit basecamp like, but it has a better support for tickets and reports. We moved from basecamp to unfuddle 4 months ago.
And it has an svn repo built in it also which updates your tickets based on your commit comments:
A commit with a message "Closed #44, #45, assign #54 to Joe" does all that in the tickets repository, which helps developers who don't like visiting the management application too much.
Also, I want to stay so focused on the top 2 or 3 items that I never need anything more complex.
That said, I have been using MS Project for quite a while - At the game development company I worked for prior to my startup, MS Project was used by everyone. From the Devs, to the Producers and platform account managers (SONY, NOA, MS) - So I learned how to use it and have been using it ever since - Granted it is bloated with a ton of features that I never use, but IMO, it gets the job done and is used by a lot of people - I can shoot over an *.mpp file to to any of my colleagues to keep tabs on all aspects of our projects; --
As it is now you can basically choose between project (great with gannt charts and dependencies, but you can't do much else and have to spend loads of time updating it), excel (lots of lists but nothing else, and no interaction with other people), or something like basecamp, which is pretty simple and really just an extended to-do list.
Whatever project you do, and whatever you choose it never quite fits, there's always something missing.
The real killer, of course, is that even though you need a gazillion features for all the different sorts of projects and managers it still needs to be simple to use.
So this is what I spend my time developing - who knows it might even work...
That was the major stopper for us in using FogBugz. We're using git and trac now, but would love something that tracks burndown.
I'll move to FogBugz eventually.
have you looked at liquid planner that was showcased at demo 08? that looks pretty tidy.
Same as me. Free, and easy.
I'm writing an Agile PM tool as a side project right now. Let me know if you'd like to beta it.
For bigger projects: MS Project
since both webcalendar and flyspray use a database. it's very easy to make dashboards.