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I have a team of developers distributed Globally over different time zones.
what are the best tools to achieve maximum productivity in such a team?
I am looking for:
Source Control
Bug Tracking
Build Management
Any other thing that may help
Thanks
For the first two:
Distributed source control, like git
A good issue tracking tool, like Jira
This question is underspecified. Many packages exist for each category that you list, all designed to support collaboration across people distributed globally over different time zones.
So I can make a recommendation, based on open-source tools that have worked for me in the past. You may have specific needs that require more specific solutions, but you didn't mention them. Also, for productivity, it is useful if people can continue to use tools they are familiar with, and you didn't explain what tools your people already know.
In any case, here is my recommendation:
use Subversion for source control
use Roundup as the bug tracker
use make for the build management, use Buildbot for automated, distributed builds
use mailing lists, based on Mailman
For .NET environment:
SVN server: VisualSVN server (free)
SVN client: AnkhSVN 2.0 (open-source)
Continuous Integration: CruiseControl.Net (open-source)
Bug tracker: BugTracker.NET (open-source). But if you can, i would recommend Trac.
I am very satisfied with Assembla - they host SVN server and Trac for your projects for very reasonable prices (or for free if the oproject is public).
Consider Fogbugz for bug tracking. It's helpful.
As source control: why not a distributed system, like git (if you are not using Windows), Mercurial or Bazaar?
For bug tracking, I would go on Trac - it has also an integrated Wiki, that is always useful for project documentation.
As for build management, you could go on cruise control, or ant - I am not really expert on this side.
However, there is something you should really take into consideration: the main issue for distributed teams is not the toolset, is communication.
This is even more important in an "agile" setup, as suggested by your tag.
The best mitigation I have ever seen for this issue is videoconferencing. It is very effective for enhancing communication bandwidth in distributed teams, and with GTalk and Skype is now really inexpensive.
When you say "open source" do you just mean free software, or do you mean "I need/prefer to be able to see the source"?
Note that your decision will be influenced by the nature of your project. There are many free development/project hosting sites that require that your project must be an open source project and free/open to the public.
You may also choose to go with a particular hosting platform based on the language you are using to develop the project. For example, CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/) is a site that hosts open source .Net based projects, and Java.Net (http://community.java.net/projects/) hosts Java projects.
The other answers given to your question are solid, here is what I currently use or have used in the past:
A great continuous build tool JetBrains TeamCity. (http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/) The tool has out of the box support for many build tools as well as for building Visual Studio solutions out of the box. It is free for teams of 20 or less developers. It also has loads of functionality out of the box, and can be up and running for you in minutes - a remarkably low learning curve without cutting back on features.
A useful SVN repository which is free for two developers, and will save you the time of setting up and administering your own SVN repository is Unfuddle. (http://www.unfuddle.com) Unfuddle also has extra paid-for features and basic task tracking.
Another paid source repository is ProjectLocker (http://www.projectlocker.com) which has low priced SVN repositories and Trac integration for task management.
A useful task tracking tool is Remember The Milk (http://www.rememberthemilk.com) - it does not work on "tickets" like Trac, it is not only for tracking projects, but it does allow you to email each other tasks, and to have shared task lists. I also point them out because the product itself is developed by a distributed development team and you might want to try mail them for advice. :-)
All the best to your team!
A wiki is a must.
It helps as an asynchronous communication media between ans inside the teams. People can share their tips (eg how do I compile this, how to activate traces ... ). It can be used to gather design decisions or changes...
People can ask questions to the whole team without clobbering other mailboxes.
It can also be used to grow the documentation.
There is a gazillion of wiki's, pick one depending on what you plan to do with it.
I think you'll need a few more things to help out with this project than what you've asked.
First, I'll give my recommendations for your list:
Source control: git or svn, if yu use either of these, you'll need a way to let your developers know who checked in what and when, Trac is good for this for svn
Bug tracking: Trac (not Bugzilla), Mantis, FogBuz
Build Management: CruiseControl is great for continuous integration; if you need build scripts try Ant or Maven
Other things you will probably need:
Collaboration tool: Trac has a wiki or pick a wiki of your choice
Chat tools: Even though they are across timezones, instant communication will be needed. IRC, Jabber, Skype, which is great for video or audio calls over the internet.
Project management: you'll need a way to setup your releases (sprints if using Scrum) and your backlog. My favorite tool for this is Acunote: (http://www.acunote.com). There are some other out there but they are more expensive and you get all of the features that you probable don't need.
I hope this helps.
Yes I strongly believe that in distributed teams a tool is important. Communication is hard enough if you are not working locally together. A tool like e.g Agilo for Scrum that is based on trac offers you with a wiki, a planning board (online whiteboard) and supports you in this way to improve the communication with your colleagues.
Related
I have a number of Windows servers at work that are used for staging web sites for clients while they are being created.
I wanted to start using versioning on them so that when we work with outside vendors on a project, if/when they overwrite my work, I'd like to be able to go back and get the version before.
My question is that I think I'm not looking for the correct terms in searching for information, but what kind of resources are there to learn how to install the software for versioning or a site to help me get started.
Any and all suggestions would be appreciated.
Steph
Since your development workflow can be decentralized (as in "there isn't always one central repository), DVCS tools, with their common tasks described here) can be more adapted.
Git-Scm
Mercurial (see HgInit.com for a very good tutorial like the kind you are after)
Plastic SCM (which has a DVCS nature)
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We have been looking to implement Agile methodology within our geographically distributed development team, so i need suggestions on any free on-line application that you have used and find useful.
Right now we are using paper cards and wall to manage this :), but we want to shift to an on-line version preferably free.
I have used TargetProcess at my previous job!
My Core requirements are:
Business Analyst can add user stories
We can assign, prioritize different user stories to developers.
QA team can add test cases around different user stories.
Project Manager can track the time of all the resources and can pull reports for upper management
I've been using Pivotal Tracker which is a free agile project management tool and covers the following agile concepts:
Velocity tracking and emergent iterations
Story-based iterative planning
Real-time collaboration
Would certainly recommend you try this before paying for an alternative.
Also, as mentioned, Basecamp is a great tool for maintaining documentation, to-do lists and the rest. There is a barely promoted free option for single project use that you will find on the signup page below the Max and Premium options.
Possibly not an agile tool as such (depends on your definition) but the free Team City continuous integration and build server is the kind of software that you don't believe you could live without once you've used it. Basically a commit to SVN by any developer triggers a build to your staging server about 30 seconds later meaning the latest build is very agile!
Timetracking: slimtimer.com.
This is one of the best time trackers I've seen (and I've seen many)
Mercurial code hosting: list available here.
I've only used the service provided by sourceforge.net and was satisfied with it.
Web conferencing, desktop and whiteboard sharing: Dimdim.
I haven't had much luck with it, but I believe it might perform much better on a Windows machine.
All sorts of version control, wiki, RSS feeds: sourceforge.net.
It's only for FOSS projects, though, but it really ofers a lot of services.
Other than that, basecamp should fit right in an agile process (although I haven't used it much) with a reasonable price ($50/month...)
Try using http://www.icescrum.org/en/. This is open source tool and free platform for Agile developments. You can read its feature on Features tab on website.
Also, Visit http://www.openlogic.com/wazi/bid/188152/Comparing-Open-Source-Agile-Project-Management-Tools. This article compares the most compelling open source options.
At work we use a product called Skinnyboard. It has a ton of great features, like:
Support for Sprints and Product Backlogs
Sprint tracking via stories/tasks
Individual task history
Sprint/Product Backlog burndown, to see projected finish dates, etc.
It's free to try, which gives you (I believe) one board. After that you have to pay though, but it's a great product and definitely worth it.
It's simple, visually appealing, and only has what you need. In my opinion, it's like the Basecamp of SCRUM tools.
They say it better than I ever could,
AgileFant is an open source tool
for managing agile software
development activities, such as:
projects, products, releases,
iterations and backlogs. It brings
together the perspectives of long-term
product and release planning and
project portfolio management.
Another one that's recently sparked some interest and seems potentially useful (I'm in beta, easy to get in afaik) is Flowdock which is basically a mish-mash of email alerts, RSS feeds, ticketing systems and plain ol' realtime chat with status messages et al. Think of it as Google Wave that doesn't suck and check out the intro video from the front page.
Try out Flying Donut. It is a new online product inspired by scrum. You may host public or private projects.
Disclaimer: I have been using it for many months, since I helped building it, and I love it.
In my organisation, we have some very inefficient processes around managing requirements, tracking what was actually delivered on what versions, etc, do subsequent releases break previous functionality, etc - its currently all managed manually. The requirements are spread over several documents and issue trackers, and the implementation details is in code in subversion, Jira, TestLink. I'm trying to put together a system that consolidates the requirements info, so that it is sourced from a single, authoritative source, is accessible via standard interfaces - web services, browsers, etc, and can be automatically validated against. The actual domain knowledge is not that complicated but is highly proprietary and non-standard (i.e., not just customers with addresses, emails, etc), and is relational: customers have certain functionalities, features switched on/off, specific datasources hooked up - all on specific versions. So modelling this should be straightforward.
Can anyone advise the best approach for this - I a certain that I can develop a system from scratch that matches exactly the requirements, in say ruby on rails, grails, or some RAD framework. But I'm having difficulty getting management buy-in, they would feel safer with an off the shelf solution.
Can anyone recommend such a system? Or am I better off building it from scratch, as I feel I am? I'm afraid a bought system would take just as long to deploy, and would not meet our requirements.
Thanks for any advice.
I believe that you are describing two different problems. The first is getting everyone to standardize and the second is selecting a good tool for requirements management. I wouldn't worry so much about the tool as I would the process and the people. Having the best tool in the world won't help if your various project managers don't want to share.
So, my suggestion is to start simple. Grab Redmine or Trac and take on the challenge of getting everyone to standardize. Once you have everyone in the right mindset then you can improve the tools you use for storage.
{disclaimer - mentioning my employer's product}
The brief experiments I made with a commercial tool RequisitePro seemed pretty good me. Allowed one to annotate existing Word docs and create a real-time linked database of the identified requisistes then perform lots of analysis and tracking of them.
Sometimes when I see a commercial product I think "Oh, well nice glossy bits but the fundamentals I could knock up in Perl in a weekend." That's not the case with this stuff. I would certainly look at commercial products in this space and exeperiment with a couple (ReqPro has a free trial, I guess the competition will too) before spending time on my own development.
Thanks a mill for the reply. I will take a look at RequisitePro, at least I'll be following the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" strategy ;) youre right, and I kinda knew it, in these situations, buy is better. It is tempting when I can visualise throwing it together quickly, but theres other tradeoffs and risks with that approach.
Thanks,
Justin
While Requisite Pro enforces a standard and that can certainly help you in your task, I'd certainly second Mark on trying to standardize the input by agreement with personnel and using a more flexible tool like Trac, Redmine (which both have incredibly fast deploy and setup times, especially if you host them from a VM) or even a custom one if you can get the management to endorse your project.
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Our group is currently reviewing our toolset and looking for new defect/issue tracking software in additional to source control, and project management software.
For issue tracking, we've looked at bugzilla, fogbugz, bugtracker.net, sourcegear fortres, and bugnet.
I'm not satisfied with the list we've come up with, so I'm curios to know what others are using.
We're looking for Active directory integration for security, although we'd settle for a windows app, a web interface may be preferential, visual studio integration is also a bonus. We need to prioritize defects, mark the version the defect was found in, mark the version the defect was fixed in, and hopefully be able to maintain a discussion around each issue/defect. We'd also like to categorize items as defect, enhancement request, etc. and document workarounds for defects.
Very similar question:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/101774/what-is-your-bug-task-tracking-tool
Try Unfuddle. If you use their version control hosting (SVN and Git options) with their issue tracker, you get some good integration stuff going on. For example, you can enter a note in your commit message such as "fixes #384: Too much foo in the bar"*, and you not only get that turned into a hyperlink to the issue, but it also marks the ticket as fixed with a link back to the changeset. All good stuff. This is a web-based solution that is hosted by Unfuddle themselves, in a SaaS-type fashion.
Other than that, +1 for Trac which I've used in the past and like very much. It's quite an immature project feature-wise, although it's got a very healthy community around it that has developed plug-ins to do a lot of extra stuff (like the AD authentication you wanted). It also has similar integration with a number of source control systems, but it's much less feature-rich than the Unfuddle stuff. That is to say, you get to use an extended wiki syntax in your commit messages which is parsed by Trac when it's display to create links. It doesn't do any of the two-way stuff that Unfuddle does. Trac is available to host in-house; alternatively, if you want it hosted, there's a list of places that will do so on Trac's wiki.
*I can't remember the exact format off the top of my head.
On our current project, we've amazingly used 6 different tracking tools (2 versions of PVCS), mostly commercial. Here's my opinion on the ones that we've used. I've listed them in order of my most favored to least.
Serena Teamtrack - We use a web client. The interface is intuitive. Performance will vary across installations, but comparing with our same data in each tool, this works the fastest. It also works in Firefox.
HP Quality Center - This is also web based, but it is IE only. On the upside, it's well organized, easy to use, and full-featured. It has reasonable performance for us as well.
It has an odd feature where there isn't a save button. It saves automatically for you. To force a save, you have to navigate to another ticket. Also when you first use it, it has to install so many DLLs that it is practically a thick client. That being the case, IE sometimes gets locked up (usually when trying to reinitialize a session after session expiration). Once locked up, you occasionally have to kill IE to regain control.
Bugzilla - I didn't use this as thoroughly as the other tools, so this isn't a fair comparison. We used it briefly for some internal tickets. I suppose the big upside is the (lack of) cost. IMO, I just didn't find the interface as nice and easy to use as the other tools. Its been awhile so I apologize for lack of specifics for why I'm relegating it below the others.
Siebel - There wasn't much to like about their defect tracking tool apart from that it is better than PVCS. The interface seems hokey. It's as if the Siebel interface has a set of user interface controls and it tries to force all square pegs into its round holes. Another downside is that it uses lengthy generated IDs so its hard to reference them or search by them. Along with that, the ticket IDs aren't sequenced.
Merant PVCS - We had separate databases and used both the web client and thick client. Its been awhile now, so the details are fading. I recall there were bugs in the tool and they weren't getting fixed, for instance reports couldn't display certain fields. Performance was bad. It took a long time to load. It was slow to navigate through tickets.
Issue tracking for support is a different problem from tracking issues during development.
Trac http://trac.edgewall.org/ is a very capable tool which supports a number of large open source projects. You can find Trac hosting at places like http://www.wush.net
If you need more workflow and custom security, you'll want to look at JIRA which is from Atlassian http://www.atlassian.com. Atlassian has a number of products which you might also find useful.
For Issue tracking in a support setting, try RT http://bestpractical.com/rt. RT is deceptively simple, but I've seen it used in the largest environments and it does a good job making sure you are accountable to every you make a support commitment to.
An off-site (www) hosted solution with all the features you mentioned is NetResults Tracker
We use bugzilla, it suits us perfectly. We haven't investigated too many others because honestly it does everything we need and then some.
We don't use Visual Studio so I can't speak for integration compatibility.
Try out HappyFox ( http://www.happyfox.com), an issue and bug tracking software. The clean interface and automation features help you track and resolve bugs smoothly. HappyFox is free for a 2 member and priced economically for larger teams.
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I have recently installed Subversion onto a Linux server (CentOS) and everything works great.
I am wondering if there are any web interfaces available for managing the repositories i.e. create / delete repositories, manage users and permissions, view revision history, etc.
The idea is that I can do everything via a web interface instead of using SSH.
Incidentally I have Plesk/virtuozzo on this server (and Webmin on another test server) so if there is something that can integrate directly to these then even better!
The Subversion people have a links list which references a ton of material related to Subversion including management and different web interfaces.
I haven't used it, but Submin might be what you're looking for.
If you're looking for simple repository browsing mod_dav_svn is minimal and works.
Trac was already suggested, but that has more bug-tracking-wiki-project-management features, but very little administration of SVN out of the box.
Take also a look at:
http://www.usvn.info/
This may be a repeat of what others have said, but I've looked at many options. The best may be these:
submin (Linux)
VisualSVN (Windows)
RVskin (for Linux/cPanel)
Creating your own custom Subversion management layer inspired me to check into VisualSVN, but I have not tested it though.
Trac may serve your purposes, but I'm not sure how much control over the actual day-to-day SVN commands it gives you. It does have a very nice interface for viewing SVN revisions however. Have a look here for an example of a Trac page for gosmore, and OpenStreetMap routing program to get an idea of what it is like.
There is also websvn and viewsvn, but I can't seem to find any that actually allow you to upload files to check in or anything like that. They are all aimed at viewing the repository, downloading files, viewing logs and comparing revisions.
In terms of the day-to-day check-in, check-out stuff, you are probably better off using the svn command or a friendly GUI like TortoiseSVN (if using from Windows) for that sort of thing.
SVN professionals suggest Subversion Edge.
Install and Update: Certified binaries, wizard driven installers with 1-click updates
Repository Management: Create, manage, browse, and local backup
User Management: Manage roles, permissions and access rules
Administration: Authentication, server management and health analytics
Desktops & IDEs: Eclipse, Visual Studio, AnkhSVN, Subclipse, and more
Cloud Services: Public cloud backup and restore to CollabNet CloudForge
TeamForge: Adds multi-server Subversion replication, code governance, improved network performance, as well as Agile ALM through DevOps
Git: Upgrade to TeamForge from SubversionEdge to manage your Git and SVN repositories within one environment
I'm really excited about it and am currently setting it up (it is Java application, so it takes some time to set it up properly compared to an ordinary web UI).
You may want to checkout VoilàSVN or OpenGrok