Project Management Systems for Developers

Competently managing a project means combining science and art! Successfully managing a project means creating a team that will produce the desired commercial or socially important product, and thus fulfill its mission. An effective manager leads the team, demonstrating a symbiosis of technical solutions and management methods in their work.

Many experts in the field of web programming have long formed their own opinion about the advantages and disadvantages of one or another project management system.
The leaders in the race of collective web programming technologies will undoubtedly be new system approaches to the process of creating an intelligent product.

Most of the interviewed experts argue that the choice of an ideal project management system depends entirely on the mission that the group of programmers has to perform.
Experts have long discussed the evolution of a new culture of automation of collaborative web programming. Among the interesting software products today are the following:
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Redmine is an open source web server application for project management and bug tracking. Redmine is written in Ruby and is an application based on the well-known Ruby on Rails web framework.



Some features of Redmine:

• Flexible role-based access system;
• An error tracking system and creating error records based on received letters;
• Maintaining project news, documents and file management, as well as creating forums and wiki pages of projects;
• Notification of changes using RSS-feeds and e-mail;
• Customizable custom fields for incidents, time costs, projects and users;
• Easy integration with version control systems (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs);
• DBMS support MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle.

Disadvantages of Redmine:

• In Redmine, you cannot control permissions at the level of individual task fields. For example, at the moment it is impossible to hide estimates of time spent on a project or information about time spent from clients.
• You can manage access rights at the project level, but you cannot assign rights to any version of a project or a separate task. This means that if the user needs access to the entire task, then he will have to give access to the entire project.
• If a Redmine user has gained access to the project, then now it is impossible to limit his activity to some specific types of tasks (trackers). For example, you cannot allow viewing or creating tasks of only a specific type.
• Delegation of tasks is not implemented in Redmine - it is impossible to transfer the task to another executor, noting that the task should be performed by him, but leaving himself to observe the task.

Easy Projects .NET is a software development project management web application written in .NET by Logic Software.



System features:

• Easy Projects .NET allows you to create an unlimited number of projects containing various custom fields. Batch processing allows you to perform typical operations for several projects simultaneously. Users have access to an interactive Gantt chart, graphs and reports. Individual projects can be grouped into project portfolios.
• It supports an unlimited number of tasks and subtasks, as well as setting up statuses, categories and priorities of tasks. You can create tasks by email. Not only developers, but also clients have the ability to add requests and requirements.
• The program allows you to make and track billable and unpaid time spent on the project. Personal and corporate timetables are supported, and there is the ability to view the schedule of resource utilization. You can customize user access rights.
• Easy Projects .NET allows you to create invoices, monitor the project budget and create the necessary reports.
• The program supports data export to MS Project, Excel, PDF and iCal, integration with Vyew, QuickBooks, SmarterTrack, Dbxtra, as well as synchronization with Easy Time Tracking. Developers have access to the API and SDK programs.
• The appearance of the system can be customized by adding or removing project information widgets. Users can use web conferencing to collaborate. Supports English, German, French and Russian interface.

Devprom is a software lifecycle management system aimed at building and maintaining efficient agile development processes.



Opportunities:

• Standardization of development processes in the company - formation and management of wishes (user histories, precedents), version management, releases, iterations and assemblies, requirements management, technical and testing documentation, formation of a work plan, accounting of used resources and all necessary reporting;
• Providing access to managers to the real state of projects - access to a Web application is possible from anywhere in the world where project participants are not located;
• Combining team members for closer interaction;
• Ensuring the transparency of processes and the sharing of knowledge within the company - Wiki-tools allows you to concentrate all the information about the project in one place, for example, the project knowledge base, requirements and technical specifications, technical and reference documentation, test plans and scenarios. All reporting on the project is available to you: work plan and reports on completed tasks, test results and changes in the source code, and much more;
• Managing the development of Agile projects (Scrum, XP). The main Agile practices are available for work: wish logs (issue backlogs), burndown diagram, iterations of the same duration (time boxing), command velocity calculation (velocity);
• Management of "classical" projects for the development or implementation of complete systems (MSF, RUP);
• Build ALM / SDLC solutions at company level.

Atlassian JIRA is a software product of the Australian company Atlassian for managing the life cycle of any project or workflow. This is a system for teamwork with tasks within a business process or project. The system allows you to work with several projects, break them into stages, customize any type of tasks, link tasks to each other, assign responsibility for various areas, customize the roles of project participants, easily generate reports, and much more.



Jobs in JIRA occurs through a web browser, in addition, the installation of JIRA in the workplace is not required.
JIRA features:

• The system is scalable and suitable for organizations with a small number of employees (less than 10 people), and for larger enterprises (up to 200 people).
• Ability to track project problems and progress;
• Support and maintenance of the project;
• Management of the progress of each task;
• Management of project requirements and tasks;
• Workflows / Process Management.

We asked experts from various companies about what project management systems they were working on, the advantages and disadvantages of these systems, and also what systems they had worked with before.

Igor Sychev, developer Compare.Ru, Microsoft Student Partner:
We have one project in the broad sense of the word. This site itself http://sravni.ru he has his part: insurance, money, as well as internal development.
I do not know if there is a global plan of changes for the next 100 years somewhere in Excel or something expensive, but for the next half year-year the plan is in the heads of managers and development.
For the next 2 months all in Team Foundation Server.
In fact, our PA is TFS. Programmers see all tasks in TFS. Each task is added there as a backlog first. Then it is divided into subtasks and added to the list for execution by programmers. All bugs go there and again understood by programmers.
There are tasks that do not get there when urgently people who are development customers (content department, insurance, etc.) are asked to do quickly and work there for 5 minutes.
In terms of the development process, they say that we have Kanban, with our internal features, due to the fact that we are doing the service and almost every day we deploy to correct small errors, but which cannot be tested without posting on a live site.
Pros:

• for programmers only. The rest there only bugs can add;
• simply;
• understandably;
• functional enough for the work of programmers.

Minuses:

• There is not enough clarity, for this we use the add-on - telerik tfs work item manager. It is more convenient for us.

I used to work on other projects in 2 different companies and a bit of freelance. Everywhere it was Head driven development. By the principle - they told you, you do. Sometimes there were deadlines of some parts. TFS also used, but only as a version control system code.
In this regard, in the Compare. Ru we have just a great project management system.

Ilya Kosmodemyansky, Intelotek Group consultant, Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL database specialist:
I do not work in the same company, I have many clients, they all use different systems - from the "jiri" to the samopisnyh. In my experience, it doesn’t matter what system to use - either works only with a good project manager. Well, and vice versa - in the absence of a good PM, no one helps.

Alexander Batsuev, Lead Developer at AnyChart.Com:
We use Atlassian JIRA in projects (as well as confluence and bamboo)
Advantages of the system: integration with their other products, flexibility
System cons: price, server requirements
Used for almost all projects.
JIRA has been used for about 5 years

Narek Mkrtchyan, head of the design bureau Indentium:
Now we use the Asana system. Among the advantages of the system are support for iOS devices, a pleasant and “usable” interface, many functions, and free use. EMS is used for various tasks, regardless of the number of participants and iterations.
The main advantage of any project management system is proper time planning.
We used to use Megaplan. They stopped because the system is overloaded with unnecessary functionality, and the interface is far from perfect.

Mikhail Vavilov, LiveJournal Project Management Director:
All SUP Media projects use Atlassian products such as JIRA and Confluence, as well as Basecamp. These tools for project management are indispensable for the work of distributed teams and allow you to monitor the progress of the execution of tasks by any executor during any period of time, as well as to compare the tasks performed with the previously set manager.

Olga Grinevskaya, GLAVSTART:
In fact, when a project is small and there are not very many people in a team, the management system is not critical.
Previously, we used MS Project, but realized that it would take much more time and effort to accustom new projects to it than it could save later.
So we work with each team individually, as it will be more convenient for them and for us.

Askar Rakhimberdiev, head of the MoiSklad Russian SaaS service:
We use JIRA and Zendesk (both in the on-demand version), since they best solve the tasks of the development and support departments, respectively.

PS It would be interesting to know which project management systems are used by habravchane.

UPD.
Oleg Vakhromeev, Development Director of REDMADROBOT:
The REDMADROBOT team loves everything simple and functional, so it works on the simplest Basecamp service, which is so versatile that it is suitable both for managing complex IT projects and for managing a family confectionery. And of course we are very inspired by the creators of the service 37signals, a dream team, which consists of only 14 people, but also works with millions of customers around the world. Well, actually created the Ruby on Rails framework, so you can trust them. To be honest, we, as a team, are in some way equal to them in our work.