Mark Torrance.com

April 27, 2005

Dotproject

We spend a lot of time managing the projects we implement for our clients. We find ourselves managing tasks, tracking bugs, planning releases, setting priorities, and needing overall reporting. We have as many as 8 developers + 2 QA testers/engineers working on these projects, and 3-4 external customer-employees + our internal project/product manager; coordinating their efforts on a list that has included over 1600 individual tasks over the past year has been a challenge.

We searched for a tool that would let us manage this work with a useful level of detail and process flow. We wanted all of these features:

• Project level reporting with deadlines and priorities
• Tasks and assignments
• Reporting for customers and for product/project managers
• Time logging for billing
• Bug tracking with CVS integration
• Release management
• Monitor external customer feedback

We explored Bugzilla, XPWeb, PHPProject, and Dotproject, all of which are open source solutions which address some of these requirements. In the end, we decided on Dotproject, but we have customized it fairly heavily for our needs, by adding the following:

• CVS integration -- developers are required to provide a Task ID for all checkins they do, and their comments become part of the Task Log for that task, with a timestamp and a link to the CVS diff summary of what they changed. This is also a convenient way for developers to log their hours without needing to access the web-based tool.
• Additional fields of information about tasks including the "release" the task is scheduled to be part of, and a workflow-supporting field called "State" which includes everything from "1 - building a case" to "8 - in QA" and "10 - Released".
• A new category of task called Bug with additional fields Severity and Resolution such as Fixed, Wontfix, CannotDuplicate, etc.
• A new reporting tab that provides aggregate and detailed reports of time spent on various tasks and how those roll up into projects, including pie charts made with jpgraph, sortable columns, and date-range filters

We've found that our modified version of Dotproject, while somewhat complex due to its power, is exactly what we need to replace the mix of Wiki, Bugzilla, and email that we had previously tried to use for the management of this project. Kudos to the Dotproject development team!

Posted by mark at 11:39 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack