What joint electronic system do you use to manage releases, functions and tasks for developers and managers?

Question

My biggest problem is ease of use, and nothing beats a spreadsheet or a Google document (except perhaps Office). At some point, the form of form formats starts to create a problem.

In particular, I have the same conceptual data shared between two documents. This is because both provide useful representations of the data. (Note that this is intended to strictly manage function descriptions written by "management" and then related to tasks created by "development").

• Document (mainly functional specification)
  • Contains high level descriptions and functions
  • It is written in the user language, but created by the client manager / marketing / manufacturers / proxy server.
  • Useful for quick viewing or a detailed introduction to the features in the release.
  • This is the "user" facing face
• Spreadsheet (mainly technical schedule)
  • Contains descriptions of function positions, ratings, and resource assignments.
  • This is the developer facing
  • Updated jointly by developers at work.
  • Useful for a detailed view of the effort required (and spent) on the features in the release.

Sometimes we want to reorient functions or add / remove them, and this happens in the document. Then this restructuring should be duplicated in a spreadsheet. This is a pain in the ass.

• My perfect solution
  • It is easy to support batch rearrangement of arbitrary groups of elements (for example, a table).
  • Fully usable without touching the mouse.
  • Be able to switch back and forth from the description of the descriptive structure to the detailed view of the position.
  • Each view displays different data, but the data moves with elements if they move.
  • Support for basic formatting of rich text
  • Support for simultaneous editing by multiple users (Ala google apps, zoho, etc.)
  • Absolutely no support for charts.

So how can you track this stuff?

Answer 1

Fogbugz is a great solution. It is also developed by a company owned by one of the co-authors for stackoverflow.com.

Answer 2

In the past employer, we are building a simple release management system. It served to transmit release dates, release notes, and defect tracking. It worked very well, and probably someone needed a week to write in PHP or something like that.

/ Allan

Answer 3

If you are model-a-holic, there is a good tool called Enterprise Architect that can help you with your “spreadsheet” management. Its multi-user interface has built-in functionality. It can also generate higher-level views, but I wouldn’t consider them both client and marketing. In my opinion, this is best configured manually and edited. EA is sometimes compared to Rational Rose without sucking, which is a pretty good description.

If formality and extensive modeling is not your strong suit (its not mine), even a simple copy of Bugzilla (or another tracker) can be used. Bugzilla keeps track of time, priorities, can be broken down by resource scheduling, etc. Other options here are Trac or Redmine.

Another popular rainbow chart tool is Microsoft Project. However, it suffers from the multi-user usability problem.

Please note that they are all developer tools, not client / user tools. As I said above, you must really do this manually. When you make a release (even interim releases), spend a couple of hours looking at the developer's tool on completed tasks and convert them to a finished client or higher. If you can’t set aside time at the end, create “big” tasks and mark tasks as dependent on these higher levels.

Answer 4

There are tons of ways to do this, obviously. I had several projects in which we used wikis that integrated task management, such as trac , and then there was more scalable software called JIRA .

Trac is open source, and I have seen its use in fairly large open source projects. Wikis are great for documentation, due to the collaborative nature of wikis and task management, they are really good for functions, as well as bug tracking. You can assign tasks, and developers can give them ratings. I really don't know what reports you can get from Trac, but at least there are already existing Trac Reports stuff. I use Trac mainly from the perspective of the developer and project supervision, but I think that it can be adapted also to management. I can recommend at least studying it.

I had only the experience of the JIRA developer, but only because this thing was used in large-scale systems, I believe that it should have fairly good reporting tools. At least he draws charts, and we know how they like it .;) It does not have a wiki function, but I used Confluence . They are both from Atlassian , so they can be combined in some way.

These are tools with which I had a really good experience. Environment wikis are pretty widely used, and you can really modify them for your own use. Task management is really a pain in the ass if you need to make all the changes manually. Thanks to the proper reporting tools and tools, you will get a better idea of ​​the progress of your project.