Which product dev setup would you choose if you could start from scratch? | Hacker News Reader

Which product dev setup would you choose if you could start from scratch?

6 pointscwilson4 comments

I'm currently in the position of making these decisions for a new venture. I have a good idea of what I'd like to do but I'd love to hear what others are happy with and/or what they would do today if they could start from scratch.

The question: I'm curious what technical cofounders or product managers would put in place today if they could pick any set of tools and processes they wanted.

The only limitations or requirements here (though I don't think this will really effect many answers) would be that we are using Python/Django/Git. We're big fans of deploy-> measure-> iterate often.

I'm talking everything from project management tools (features, milestones, issues, bug tracking, backlog, etc) to how you deploy.

View on HN

Basecamp can be used in replace of redmine while the development team is small, but redmine is generally better suited for bug/issue tracking as the engineering team grows.

As far as processes are concerned at the start, I try to keep it to a minimal as long as everyone is in the room together. If you have a bunch of remote team members, Basecamp/Campfire will probably need to be used more.

We use fabric for python/django deployment and host on rackspace cloud. The long-term goal is to reach continuous deployment but this takes time. http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo...

Wireframe the product and customer flows before you touch photoshop or code. But then I generally jump straight into code. CSS can get really out of hand as an application grows if you don't start spotting reusable patterns in the UI as soon as possible.

Github for source control, probably Firewall Install if we could afford it.

- Pivotal Tracker for agile bug tracking.

- Basecamp for non-programmer interaction and tracking (ie, mocks, UX, QA, etc)

- Campfire with custom bots for inter-group communication, use Pyro on the desktop

- Some sort of custom status-board type system (Geckoboard, etc) for tracking in/out status of distributed personnel, system status, etc.

- Zendesk for customer support

- Rackspace cloud + Capistrano for dev environments. Or EC2. Either way.

- Hudson for CI

- Dropbox + Shared folders for file sharing

- Google Docs for collaborative editing

github for source control, redmine or possibly pivotal for issue tracking, and the wiki on github for wiki info.

what do you use for tracking and managing inbound user feature requests and support issues?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com