Project tracking/management toolWhich project tracking tool do you use?
Does it allow programmers to bill hours worked to projects/tasks?
Does it allow to track items promised vs. items delivered?
Does it allow to forecast personnel needs when you have only a ballpark estimate of how many hours you are going to need for different task types?
Does it integrate with your bug tracker? [Mantis]
Does it integrate with your source control tool? [Subversion]
Does it allow you to easily publish your schedule and current priorities to team members?
Does it produce reports on any or all of the above?
Am I even right in calling a tool that does those things a "Project tracking/management tool"?
What does your tool have that makes you love it and use it every day?
I don't really care about Gantt charts. I find Microsoft Project quite clunky for this needs (although I'm hardly an expert user).
FogBugz [1] is a good system that meets most (perhaps all) of your listed features, and many more. The nice thing is that it integrates features your programmers would use daily, so it doesn't seem like an extra burden to start a time card program - you just work from here. You get your tasks, bugs, customer communications, time, estimates, etc.
[1] http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBUGZMatt, they don't advertise it for some reason but here is how you get it:
Sign up for the FogBugz on Demand 45 day trial account. Then in your settings choose "Your FogBugz On Demand Account".
About half way down that page is a link to switch your account to the "Student and Startup Edition)" which allows you to have up to 2 users for free, with no expiration.
Nobody seems to have mentioned Redmine [1]. It is a simple yet rather complete forge-like software in which you can have projects and sub-projects with BTS, time-tracking, version planning, fora for discussions and so on. Check this other topic [2] too.
[1] http://redmine.org/I am a fan of ProjectPier [1], it started out as an attempt to create a clone of BaseCamp [2], which is also a very good system (especially if you don't mind having it 'cloud'-based). ProjectPier is a bit more limited, but a recent patch allows you to add timetracking.
BaseCamp is great if you want to have something fully-featured, and seems to have a lot of third-party plugins that utilize its API also.
[1] http://www.projectpier.orgA nice simple free task management tool is ToDoList [1] which can do most of what you asked in your questions (it also has a bunch of add-ins.) It is available for download at CodeProject [2].
[1] http://www.abstractspoon.com/tdl_resources.htmlI can second Fogbugz. It's kinda expensive, but so far it's really worth it.
We also use Lighthouse [1] internally (evaluating it on another project), but afaik it doesn't allow you to enter the time worked etc. in order to bill for hours. What's nice though is, Lighthouse is very easy to use and they offer an API as well which allows you to extend it so e.g. you can integrate it with a timetracker, or whatever.
Another application we use is Cerberus Helpdesk [2]. It's less of a project management tool and used for support. I guess you could do PM in it too, but that wouldn't be as straight forward. I'm not so sure if it's still state of the art since we've run into many issues, but it seems to be one of the best PHP based helpdesks still. We host it on our own servers and it allows you to enter the time you worked on tickets, so if that is what you are after primarily, I'd give it a try. It's also CRM light since it allows you to add customers and you can get a report for basically everything. If you get the license, everything but the email parser (afaik) is open source (not free, but the source code is "readable"), which means that you can extend it easily.
If you are looking for a free options, there are probably gazillions. Do a search on Sourceforge [3] for starters. One tool I can recommend is streber-pm [4]. PHP(5) based as well and it needs a MySQL database. It works very well. :)
[1] http://www.lighthouseapp.com/We use Jira [1] that is mainly a BUG tracker plus time/resource planning. It lets programmers log their work and all this data can be used to draw charts or tables which are valuable to managers.
It is highly extensible through plugins written in Java.
[1] http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/No surprise that we are discussing FogBugz, given the history of this site!
FogBugz is a good tool for software development project management, but it is unabashedly programmer-centric, and doesn't necessarily adapt well to things too far from software development. I evaluated it for use to help manage overall IT function for a company and found it had some holes.
I believe the absence of "management"/"productivity"/"monitoring" tools in FogBugz is completely intentional. If the project management system is used for evaluating programmers, programmers will not be honest with the project management system and will instead "game" it so they look better. Such a lack of honesty defeats the primary purpose of FogBugz. I also think the concept of using his software to be big brother offends Mr. Spolsky, who has written a great deal about the care and feeding of programmers.
Which project tracking tool do you use? dotProject
Does it allow programmers to bill hours worked to projects/tasks? yes
Does it allow to track items promised vs. items delivered? yes
Does it allow to forecast personnel needs when you have only a ballpark estimate of how many hours you are going to need for different task types? you can change dynamic tasks as you go
Does it integrate with your bug tracker? With add-ins it can integrate with mantis
Does it integrate with your source control tool? Not with our Sourcegear Vault
Does it allow you to easily publish your schedule and current priorities to team members? yes, with reports or they can view it directly
Does it produce reports on any or all of the above? It does have several reports
Am I even right in calling a tool that does those things a "Project tracking/management tool"? you are correct
What does your tool have that makes you love it and use it every day? For me, it is the gantt charts.
Trac [1] is an awesome tool, with many add-ons that will provide the functionality you need.
[1] http://trac.edgewall.org/Pivotal Tracker [1] is pretty great for a lot of this, especially in a more agile environment.
[1] http://www.pivotaltracker.comWe use Version One [1]. It's designed to organize agile (esp. Scrum and XP) projects. Doesn't integrate with much, but it has an API. Let's you sort your user stories by priority, shuffle out work, and track progress against it.
[1] http://www.versionone.com/index.aspI built my own simple system and it works ok for me. I am very interested in project management type software and looked at dozens of them. One thing I realized is that while they all do about the same thing there is no one best system. It's like CMSes. There are tons of CMSes but people still build their own because they can't find one that does what they want.
One caveat about FogBugz: It's next to impossible to get timesheets for individual programmers. You can only do it case by case.
This IMO is the biggest drawback of FogBugz.
ETA: You can get your own timesheet. But not the timesheet of others. Also you cannot get the amount of time spent on a project over a given period of time. This makes it very hard to use FogBugz as your main project management app - you can't easily get information from FogBugz to use for billing.
I also use FogBugz. For small projects (less then 2 people) they have a free hosted version.
We are using our own in-house projectmanagement tool for everything except bugtracking which we are using BugTracker.net from Codeplex.
Why we are using a own projectmanagement tool and not a existing one, i have no clue since it is was the bosses that wanted it and not someone else application.
I recommend Excel - allows for great flexibility
eSoftHead recently deliver the new project management module in its enterprise groupware product. You can check it at http://blog.esofthead.com/engroup-1-5-1-released/ and download product at http://esofthead.com/node/25. It is totally free !
JIRA really works for me especially with the Greenhopper plug in. I also find it useful to record the basics relating to the requirements and in that way reducing the requirements documents needed.
I would recommand PlanningForce Express Premium, a project planning software [1] for small teams which is a real Microsoft project alternative: cheaper and more efficient!
[1] http://www.planningforce-express.com/product/Check out CounterSoft Gemini [1].
It's ASP.NET based and even our clients use it to "talk" to us!
I think it's free for 5 users.
[1] http://countersoft.comCheck out PlanningForce's Project Planning tool [1]. Hope it might help you.
Happy Holidays !!!
[1] http://www.planningforce.com/We are doing our daily work with a ProjectForge http://labs.micromata.de/display/pf/Home JIRA combo, this works great.
Turns out Wikipedia [1] has an awesome list on this. You can match products against features and filter those who best meet your needs from the list. I was surprised that there are open source alternatives like endeavour that offer all and even more than some commercial offerings.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_project_management_softwareTargetProcess2 [1] is a nice tool that includes most of the mentioned features and more. It is free for 5 users as far as i can recall.
[1] http://www.targetprocess.com/