Project management app/webapp discussion

#1 Tortoise svn, email and common sense. there is no software out there to top that; if there is no real commitment, no code can help. good games/projects were successful without any project management software.

however, it doesn't mean you shouldn't use any. Overlord it's kind of nice, Alienbrain is darn expensive.

#2 Trac is really awesome, integrates with SVN, and is a snap to setup. You can also get it as part of a CVSDude package.

#3 Sure, SVN goes without saying.
Trac is nice...of course ;)

nothing different/out of the ordinary ?

On an indy note for cheapness:
(dreamhost allows SVN and it is a snap through their control panel...CVSdude is nice but the price and data limits/User count are a bit off-kilter.)
BTW, if you go to Dreamhost and use the code POLYCOUNTERS, It will cost you $38.00 for 1 year.
[unless they canceled the coupon code within the last week]

P.S. There are mixed reviews about dreamhost..so do your own research plz.

#4 I like Overlord, but it has too many bugs to be able to use it for a medium sized team. Most of the bugs are security and registration related bugs that the developers were reluctant to admit existed, but which plagued us nonetheless. (One bug that they finally fixed was when a new user could inadvertently overwrite the ADMIN account, thus blocking both the Admin and the new user from being able to log in. Very dangerous bug. Another bug that remains unfixed is if you have two users who register with the same name, it partially overwrites the original user, and incapacitates them both. Like if Bob registers, and then another Bob registers, it doesn't check to see if Bob already exists. It just overwrites.) Some could be fixed by the user community if they would release the source to licensees, but they haven't. And they totally stopped working on fixing it.
http://www.phpoverlord.com/forum/index.php/topic,139.0.html

So we are in need of a different management tool as we're looking to grow the size of our team, and feel this would help maintain cohesion as we add new members. We tried to install Trac on a Dreamhost server, and something about the way Dreamhost forced us to install it prevented us from being able to use it at all. We can't add new users, we can't add tasks, we can't do anything with it. On an unrelated note, Dreamhost also has a policy that they won't allow you to move domain hosting between accounts, they have accidentally closed my account twice (and restored it when I emailed them) they tried to revoke my 1 year promotional subscription and charge me full price as a result of one of those "accidental" closeures. And while they do have built in SVN service (which is hard to find) they also have a bandwidth restriction on using it. You can only transfer no more than 250 mb at a time per SVN connection, or it boots you off.

So, we are moving our accounts to a new service. Hopefully we haven't jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, and will see some improvement with the new service.

So we are now looking for a more stable PM tool. I was just looking at scrumninja.com and it looks like it might work for smaller projects, or projects where you can actually see your co-workers face to face, but I don't know that it will work for my online team. We looked at Basecamp which is the latest and greatest thing right now, but the free version only allows 4 users or something like that, and to get to the level of users that we would need for our growing team, we would have to pay $50 a month, and I can't afford that. So we are still looking.

SVN is not an adequate PM tool though. If you're managing 30 or more people you need an effective way to make sure everyone who is on the team knows what they are supposed to be doing. And the team needs a consistent place to look for their assignments. We're just using a simple wiki page at the moment, and it works, kinda. But it's a little cumbersome to update when tasks are finished. It would be nice to just have a check mark button we could click when the task is done, rather than having to modify the page each time. Thus the need for a PM tool.

Hope this rambling helps someone to be able to learn from our experiences. And perhaps someone will find the perfect PM tool for Indie game developers.

#5 I use Netoffice
It's free, simple to setup, and just plain works. It can also be setup on any host that allows you to have a database.

I used overlord for a while. It was a nice peice of software and I had no problems with it. (yes I heard about the bugs, but never encountered them) I switched away only becouse I didn't want to call my team members "menions". It was too WoW ish.

#6 I use Assembla.com

#7 Trac - it also shows all the SVN updates in the timeline

#8 Huddle.net isn't so bad for team workspaces, though it does lack some features...

#9 I also like Assembla.com

#10 Trac, Subversion, a Jabber server... and sometimes a separate Dokuwiki instance because of the power of the plugins, and because some things are not project-specific.

#11 Take a look at Hansoft ;)
Best application out there for projetc management.