March 4, 2004

9:01 AM

Does anyone have any recommendations for applications that handle software development life cycle management? I am after something that pulls together scheduling of new development alongside bug tracking and feature requests for live code...
posted by chill to (6 comments total)

I've used MSProject and it's fine to a certain degree for managing new development, but has no realistic capability for managing bugs and feature requests. I am currently trying out FogBugz, but while it seems to be a pretty good bugs database, I can't see this being any use for tracking large scale development too. It is an ongoing internal project, nearly 3 years old, with years left to go. 3 developers, plus two tiers of mamagement above this.
Killer featuers would be the ability to allow users to email issues into the system, and meaningful integration with Source Safe. Outlook/Exchange integration would be good too.
posted by chill at 9:01 AM on March 4, 2004

You might take a look at Visual Intercept. I haven't used it for a few years, but it was an awesome product.

My compnay uses Source Safe, Project, and a web app called Problem Tracker that I wouldn't reccomend.
posted by drobot at 9:18 AM on March 4, 2004

What's your budget? Rational is probably the best, but it ain't cheap.
posted by normy at 9:19 AM on March 4, 2004

Cheers drobot, I'll look into that.
normy - budget is a tricky question to answer. Anything under $1000 would be approved no question. Over that level, and we'd have to work quite hard to get it approved. I would have though it highly unlikely that anything over $5,000 dollars would be approved as a very rough ball park.
Having said that, I'm not the only development team in the company, and I think the other groups here possibly feel that they are growing out of their existing management tools, and so bringing them on board may up our budget. They work on commercial apps though, both enterprise and desktop, so requirements of the system would start to change quite a lot.
posted by chill at 9:32 AM on March 4, 2004

You might want to look at SourceOffSite Collaborative Edition. I'm not sure if it has the email integration, but I think it has the rest of what you want.
posted by bbrown at 1:32 PM on March 4, 2004

I know of a great number of projects from miniscule to enormous which have had much success using Savannah, the software behind SourceForge.
posted by majick at 8:15 PM on March 4, 2004