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I'm the sole s/w eng in my company. I look after about 10 different projects. At the moment, all my organisation is in notebooks, and on (rapidly growing) piles of hand written notes. But it also relies heavily on my memory! As time goes by, and the project list increased, its getting harder to manage.
I'm looking at recording project status, bug reports, future work, the whole lot.
Would something like bugzilla be the best tool? Trello? Wipe board on the wall?
Ideally it would be free to use.
Or is the pile of paper notes still king?
Project management - Excel
Specific dev/bug/actions items - bugzilla/Jira/Fogbugz (used the last two and they're good for managing specific dev items but I've always found Excel is best for a 'big picture' view (and easier to circulate to interested parties as a project status report).
Depends on who needs to see what and who needs to interface with it, Trello always looks good and gets great write ups from teams - the failing of a one man team is there is never a need to communicate so filling things in doesn't happen!!
TFS (Visual Studio Team services for cloud based version) or Jira. Yeah they are are perhaps a bit of overkill for a single dev but being able to get users to log issues and then communicate back with them is really useful. Also (in TFS's case) gives you source control if you don't already do it.
GitLab? Â Integrated source hosting, bugs, wikis, project management etc.
Jira is easiest to get up and running off the shelf. TFS needs a sharepoint dude to make it work properly.
Have seen customers use a blend of Jira, Jama, Excel, post it notes (for PI planning sessions), Confluence (for documentation) and TFS. The best one was Jira/Confluence/Post-its.
Excel is a good shout. probably microsoft's best product, ever.
I can recommend Confluence for documentation. It's one of the few tools in the enterprise that nobody has any complaints about.
We're forced to use HP ALM (formerly QC) for issue tracking etc, but I think we're moving over to Jira sooner rather than later.
How on earth would one use Excel to organise these sorts of things. Just a big group of lists? Anyone got an example to share? I'm a big fan of Excel, use it almost daily, so feels like a good fit, but always struggle when lots of text is involved.
I wouldn't be comfortable using Atlassian products. I currently (for last 5yrs) use SourceTree, and that is anything to go by, it's not a company I'd trust my project info to. From a dire product point of view, not a security one.
TFS needs a sharepoint dude to make it work properly.
It doesn't (I set ours up and I know sfa about sharepoint). For a one man team I'd be looking at the free online version anyway.
From a dire product point of view
Source tree a a particularly bad product isn't it! The cloud stuff seems better designed but have also experienced lots of dropouts while using them (not able to save, panels not loading etc).
Have used confluence for task management, minutes recording (including actions/tasks) as well as documentation. Very useful tool and easy to pick up. Found Jira to be a little inflexible, great for doing the same type of task over and over (e.g software release), probably need to use it more to be more efficient/effective
I've just started using Trello, it seems simple & effective.
One alternative to pen/paper is iPad with Apple Pencil - the big advantages here are that a) everything is backed up to the cloud & b) all the handwritten notes are searchable
Similar situation to op. I use a combination of Google keep and Excel. As always being the lone ranger means not everything gets recorded as it should.
Excel is a good shout. probably microsoft’s best product, ever.
Nah, that honour goes to OneNote.
Jira is great for larger projects with a more strategical view/output on things (lots of metrics can be pumped in to and out of Jira if thats your thing and you love reporting)
Trello is the defacto Kanban board for tracking projects. We have one per-project and it just works.
Excel is a good shout. probably microsoft’s best product, ever.
2nd most dangerous after Access, some quick colouring in and people think they have a robust solution. Too much power there!!
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. Still working on which method to go with.
Does anyone use
? This seems like a good, very lightweight, way of tracking info.
The Jira/confluence approach makes much sense for teams (just beware the price hikes when you hit the max users for each tier). Â For a one-man-band not really.
Trello might work for you, but still needs discipline to move and update tickets.
we work with an external consultant who uses Evernote to good effect - basically a giant log file for each project or sub project. Â You can create actions, todos etc, and it keeps an audit log to show when things were done etc. Â I am sure there will be similar alternatives.
JIRA is fine. We use it Enterprise wide, along with a client ticketing system, however, used to use ASANA which was dead easy but lacked the Kanban flows so moved on to JIRA - of course within a week ASANA had development and had all our needs covered. Ya takes ya choice and all that.
Another shout out to GitLab. Easy setup and very organised. Direct connection between your issue queues and source code control helps - a lot.
(Please tell me you use some form of source code control?)
rachel
As suggested above, why not give Visual Studio Team Services a go?
It's free, just create projects for each and then you can create work items, bugs, backlogs, queries and also have the ability to keep all your source code safe. It's available online also.
And should your software team expand you've got a good foundation already.
GitLab for more or less everything these days - source control, issues, CI, project docs via wiki and pages. We have on premise but I use hosted version for personal stuff.
For things that aren't tied to one project, higher level tasks/planning we use Trello.