Lately I decided it’s time to upgrade our development tools. Up until recently we used Bugzilla (installed on one of our servers) for bug tracking, subversion was installed on one of our servers as well and Google sites was used for wiki.
The advantage was it was all free! Well not really – the servers for Bugzilla and SVN did cost some money, having our sys admin manage these servers + backups costs money and most important – these tools aren’t the most comfortable ones around so I’m sure some industrial engineer could calculate the costs of our developers using non-fun tools (or worst – not using them).
So I decided it’s time to grow up and defined the following requirements for my search for the best development project management tools combination:
1. It should include comfortable bug tracking
2. It should include a wiki system
3. It should integrate to Subversion (or alternative source control system)
4. It should have built-in support for agile development
5. It should support multi-project for all the above
6. Preferable: a hosted solution where we don’t need to maintain the system.
7. Preferable: A single integrated tool for all the above
Apparently, with all the project management tools out there, meeting all these requirements in a single solution is still VERY rare. Here’s the list of tools I looked at, my thoughts and why I didn’t use it (those are the ones that I found worth mentioning, there were a few others):
- Basecamp - Very easy to learn and use but very basic. I think this tool is great for project manager of different kinds but not for development projects.
- PivotalTracker - This tool is really fun to use, I think it’s the best tool for agile development but that’s the only thing it is, it does not meet any of the other requirements
- Redmine – Seems to answer all the requirements and also quite easy to use but for some reason I couldn’t find any hosted solution for this
- fogbugz – one the most suitable options I checked. They also have a comfortable model that charges you per user rather then packages. I didn’t pick them eventually because I preferred to stay with Subversion as the source control rather then studying and migrating to their proprietary klin
Most other solutions were kind of clones of the basecamp, none answered all my requirements.
Eventually I chose Jira Studio from atlassian. I’ve known their great tools from the past, the only 2 reasons I didn’t use them from the start were: 1) They’re a bit complex with sometime too many options 2) I didn’t like the fact that their pricing comes in packages (rather then per user) and make me pay more monthly.
So far I’m very happy with my choice, only thing which is still a pain is migrating the subversion repositories but that’s not atlassian’s fault and it’s a topic for another post.
