I am going to take some time over the next few months to work with some different project management software. I would like to find something that is a good fit for small teams. I have been working in an agile shop for several years now. I hope to find some software that allows me to continue to work in an agile way. I don’t want to get weighed down with a lot of extra work. Further I want something that will work for both in house teams and remotely distributed teams.
It has been my experience that many software development techniques are designed for large teams working in a large corporate environment. For the majority of my career I have worked with small teams and have struggled to find development processes that were a good fit for small teams. This is why Agile is so attractive to me. It is light weight enough to not get in the way of developing the software. So now that I am comfortable working with Agile, I want to some help with bring together our remote developers and clients.
What I will be looking for is a tool for tracking user stories and tasks by user story. The software should provide assistance with agile estimating; building user story/task lists for each iteration, tracking project burn down and estimating project completion. The ability for remote users to stay on top of these stories and tasks is mandatory. I will throw in other requirements as they occur to me.
For evaluation of each package I am going to use a project that I am doing as a hobby with my son. We are working on a game for the Xbox 360 developed with the XNA game studio and C#. This will provide a familiar (at least for me) project without having to worry about disclosing any confidential client information.
This is not going to be a scientific look at each package. I am just going to figure it out as I go. I have not given much thought to what software I am going to review. I will start with a product that was introduced to me through an email list from The Code Project. The package is called onTime and is produced by axosoft. Axosoft has a 30 day free trail for its’ entire suite and a free single user license. After evaluating that package I will begin searching for another package. I you have any thoughts on other software I should look at or requirements I should evaluate I would like to hear from you. Leave me a message in the comments or email me at bud underscore wheeler at hotmail dot com.
