Project Managment, Modelling tools

yop

Lads

We are in the process of trying to purchase what I think is a modelling tool.

We had a meeting yesterday and it was suggestd we needed something to manage our projects, handle change requests, link these change requests to code, give us overview of projects, work on going, people assigned etc.

Now Rational Rose was mentioned but it seems mental expensive but it plugs into VB which is what we need.

Sooo, any suggestions on what I might be looking for?
Thanks

bambam

Our place is close to moving to JIRA http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ (good bye and good riddance ClearQuest!).

Another thing that may be good for you is Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Though I'm not sure about the stability of this product, research it before using. I had a mate last week, telling me it was causing his company grief.

hshortt

My experience is limited somewhat when considering project management tools. However, MS Project server may do exactly what you want any then some. It's one I've implemented here at work and people use it quite well. Its all based on SQL Server and about due an upgrade so the most relevant place for information would be this page - http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/assistance/HA010254871033.aspx

Cheerio
Howard

copacetic

we use jira, but it isn't great for project planning. it is good for bug, release and stuff like that, you would need something else to do the higher level planning, although they are coming out with plug ins as you go, it is an enterprise license though.

project server is good, but incredibly expensive if you want a lot of people to be able to use it properly.

Kernel32

If you want quick and easy I highly reccommend Fogbugz http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/

It's different to the other tools. It's lean and its not expensive but it has some great features. It's based on more of an agile approach so everything is in list format. You can do basic project management, task estimation, generate release notes and it integrates with several source control systems like VSS. I work for a software development company as a side job that was started by a good friend of mine. We work on some pretty decent sized projects, $500k to $750k projects and we use this to manage everything. It's so easy to use which means we actually use it rather than avoid it which tends to happen with the bigger tools.

madramor

yop wrote:

Lads

We are in the process of trying to purchase what I think is a modelling tool.

We had a meeting yesterday and it was suggestd we needed something to manage our projects, handle change requests, link these change requests to code, give us overview of projects, work on going, people assigned etc.

Now Rational Rose was mentioned but it seems mental expensive but it plugs into VB which is what we need.

Sooo, any suggestions on what I might be looking for?
Thanks

do you want something that will go from
client input -> code
that could lead to a lot of problems in the process.

here an opensource project manager for the high level stuff, never used it
http://www.openworkbench.org/

what IDE are you using, does it not have a plugin with a modelling tool that would require less training and downtime.

yop

Thanks for all the input lads.

Just more information

We have a team of 5 developers and 4 testers.

So the work gets requested from the Customer through the management then they come to us who do the work.

Now at the moment we have electronic forms of the Documentations, SDS, SRS, change requests, Software Faults, Test Scripts, meetings etc.

When say for example a change request is done, management will type it up and give it to us, then eventually it will be done.

What they want is visibility of all the processes once this document has been generated, visibility of tasks to be done, stage of these tasks etc.

We are using Visual Basic 6, Visual C++ and SQL Server. DotNet is also starting to be used.
We have a lot of large projects and a lot of processes within these, visibilty of each is very hard to obtain.

Thanks

copacetic

from what you say above, jira would be great for all that. you can track all of that stuff by issue number, and issues can be feature request, bugs etc. then everyone can see what issues will be addressed in what release etc and no-one can expect an issue to be addressed if it wasn't in Jira and flagged for a certain release. It's all web based and pretty straightforward and the guys are helpful when you are setting it up.

I wouldn't bother with openworkbench unless you can't afford MS project, I found it to be a copy of project but missing some features.

yop

Thanks Dave, have a look at it there and Jira seems excellent, one thing that my boss pointed out when he saw it was that Oh can I get a list of issues for all projects, I don't think you can.

How stronge is it on Reporting, the suits want this capability

Also what you think of this, a bit lightweight maybe?

http://www.seapine.com/ttpfeatures.html

copacetic

yop wrote:

Thanks Dave, have a look at it there and Jira seems excellent, one thing that my boss pointed out when he saw it was that Oh can I get a list of issues for all projects, I don't think you can.

How stronge is it on Reporting, the suits want this capability

Also what you think of this, a bit lightweight maybe?

http://www.seapine.com/ttpfeatures.html

you can of course do this in jira, all this is very easy, if someone has permissions they can view any issue on any projects at the same time, with filters like who reported them, type of issue, who they are assigned to, when they were assigned etc etc etc, you can export the reports into excel etc

I haven't seen that one before so couldn't comment.

yop

Mighty,

I must have missed these features!

Cheers

copacetic

have a look under 'find issues' if you have a trial version, check out this link to the page in codehouse.org's jira:

http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa