I have been thinking about a project management tool whose database could be placed under an SCM and therefore branch with projects, allow good history control etc. Someone at work sent me a link to ditz, it looks promising, will play with it at some point.
As the person who sent me the link pointed out, it suffers (we think) when assigning unique identifiers to defects/stories – In a decentralized environment how do you get the next unique ID, without falling back to GUID’s which are fine for machines but not humans? I will need to look at in detail, maybe they have solved this?
Possibly all I need is git and ditz (rather than git + redmine) and drop the requirement for fancy GUI based input.
Although the system I initially imagined would have a ruby on rails application, using WEBrick. The web application could be fired up, run locally and provide a GUI based means to edit the project. To be honest it could be any form of visual editor but platform agnostic. I liked the web based front end as it would conceptually allow non-technical people to manage the project.
In the Voxar 3D 6.0 project we both worked on, Voxar3dSpec was a source-controlled file system representing the requirements subset of issues, updated alongside the code, with a modest GUI (the spec browser.) Of course it’s not a clean match with what you’re exploring, since defect issues were handled separately in TestTrack, and the spec & browser also had manual acceptance test-plan responsibilities – but maybe worth looking back to see what worked and what didn’t, tech and process wise?
Anthony, I agree with you, this approach has pro’s and con’s and its worth a little retrospective in this area.
Personally I find most of the current “agile” project management tools to be bloated front ends to a simple list. Also they really do not handle branching – It’s in this area I think this type of tool wins out (or should). It’s really hard to diff projects in a meaningful way using Trac, VersionOne etc.
Need to play around with ditz and compare with the spec. browser (its still going!).
Hope you had a good xmas