Yesterday, I wrote a little about starting a new job and how I miss some of my tools. I mentioned I wished I had the budget to bring in the tools I used in my last job. We used Atlassian's Confluence and Jira together. These pieces of software work well together. They were designed that way. They were easy to use, mostly because I know how to use them.

If I wanted to push, we could probably devote the budget to bring these tools in. I know there are other tools available: some open source, and some a little less expensive. At this point with the project backlog, though, I would rather devote the budget to some extra hands. After all, per the Agile Manifesto, individuals and interactions are more valuable than tools. Time to try different tools to accomplish the goals.

Goals

My goals for implementing Wiki/Issue Management tools are:

• Centralize project intake
• Centralize technical documentation repository
• Centralize work log status
• Improve prioritization
• Improve collaboration
• Reduce "lost" requests

The true goal is to stop the madness: email. All of these things get done today. New projects come in as an email. Technical documentation is passed around in email. Work log status... well... not passed around in email, but driven by email notifications. Email sucks. Things get lost. If the only place you store your technical documentation is in email, you end up searching and searching for a document when someone asks for it. Or, you end up with some elaborate email folder structure that goes on for screen after screen. Worst of all: things get lost in email, either because of the size of the mountains of email, or because it does not get delivered.

Candidates

After I accepted my new position, the first thing I did was renew research into the tools available. Confluence and Jira were an integral set of tools to the project life cycle I wanted to introduce. Sure, we had challenges with the tools, but they were mostly due to organization and focus. After introducing them, we never really took a step above the trees to look at the forest again and gain our bearings.

I identified a number of candidate tools to review:

• Trac
• MediaWiki
• BugZilla
• RT: Request Tracker
• DekiWiki
• Redmine
• dotProject
• Mingle
• activeCollab

Some of these provide an integrated wiki/issue management tool approach. Some don't. I originally decided to approach it by finding 2 tools that worked well on their own and sacrifice the integration between the tools.

Evaluation Process (abbreviated and small company-ish)

I spent a little time on each one, mostly evaluating information on their web sites.

I reviewed Mingle, because of ThoughtWorks reputation with agile development. I decided not to try it out, because my use goes beyond just software project management. I have support issues, marketing projects and infrastructure projects to fit into my chosen tools. Mingle was designed to facilitate software development. I believe it does this well and possibly overcomes the visibility issues I mentioned with Confluence and Jira.

I signed up with activeCollab to try out their demo and spent about 15 minutes playing around with it. In my short time with it, I decided it was a decent piece of software. I moved on, however, because of the monthly cost. I really wanted to look at something in the open source arena.

I used RT a couple of jobs ago. It was extremely easy to use, not so easy to setup. It also looks like it did a couple of jobs ago. I spent about as much time looking at that again as I did writing that sentence.

BugZilla is a well known issue management tool. MediaWiki is a well known wiki (I spend a good amount of time on wikipedia.org, as do a lot of people). I found a great article while perusing the BugZilla site providing a how-to for integrating MediaWiki, BugZilla and SVN. I haven't spent much time discussing source control in this article, but it's one of my important tools. I spent some time working on setting this up and creating my own how-to for doing it on Ubuntu server edition. I was fully committed to getting this to work and spent a couple of weeks working on it. I chalk up most of my issues getting this working to inexperience with mailman, which was important to the integration process and linking it to email. I finally lost patience before getting far enough to start organizing my wiki. I went back to the drawing board without evaluating the merits of the software platforms.

Trac Wins...

I moved on to Trac. As a friend pointed out, it is king in the issue management arena. It has a light-weight wiki, issue management and hooks into Subversion all built in. The email was also extremely easy to set up. It's written in python with a very straight-forward plug-in architecture. I spent so much time fighting with the MediaWiki/BugZilla/SVN integration. My backlog is so long. No more evaluation process. I need to get some work done.

...for now

After we get a little work done, I plan to reevaluate my tools. I plan to spend the next 3 to 6 months evangelizing the wiki and introducing project intake, prioritization and issue management processes (light, mind you). Once we've used the tools for a while, we will look into some different tools, like Plone, and decide if it's worth changing.