Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Project Management software and phpcollab3, distributed bugtrackers

The list for opensource project management tools is impressive and soon will be added launchpad to the list (used by ubuntu or call it canonical)
another pm tool that was used at reea is phpcollab, seems that is now rewritten in symfony framework and is hosted in github

what launchpad got it right is the bugtracking that is link-ed somehow to external upstream bugtrackers
for example if you have an bug in debian you can link-it to the bug
maybe some kind of distributed approach to bugtracking and project management should be applied
clients always have externals tools for pm and bugtracking (mantis , bugzilla , launchpad)
maybe some concepts from git can be applied to bugtracking too , when you finish your bug in launchpad
upstream should be notified and similar bug closed if is there , or maybe the bug should be submitted directly there and all the updates (it's like the origin thing in git )
git push origin applied to bugs (commit local bug and then push it to origin)
another issue i have with bugtrackers is that they are ugly take a look at bugzilla, mantis , trac have the worse interfaces in sofware industry but i found one that makes me wet , is simple and beautiful is the issue tracker from github , just to give you an example
http://github.com/rowland/fb/issues
this is the first issue tracker that made me submit bugs and to feel pleasure and not pain , ok ok the google code one is close but ... not so hot