Tools for Supporting the Process and Workflows of openPETRA Development

Purpose of Such Tools

Aid the decentral development process of openPETRA by

• providing a Ticket System (Bug Tracker, Issue Tracker)
• allowing an overview of who is working on what
• allowing for an integration of our source code repository, at least at the Ticketing System level
• supporting openPETRA Agile processes
• Potentially: providing a wiki that has more capabilities than MediaWiki in the SourceForge configuration
• Potentially: aid code review

What We Are Looking For

We are looking first for suites of tools as it makes sense to have some functions well connected with each other, but if we find separate tools that would work better and can still be integrated with the other tools reasonably well, than we are happy for that as well. A wiki might be a standalone tool, for example.

Tool Suites Under Review

JIRA, Bamboo, Greenhopper, Confluence

These tools are part of a commercial suite, but they are free for open source projects (when one is hosting them for oneself). They are provided by Atlassian.

• JIRA combines issue tracking and project tracking
• Bamboo is a continuous integration server that automates building and testing
• Greenhopper adds agile project management capabilites to a JIRA project
• Confluence is a very powerful wiki (for which many plug-ins exist). See also Wikipedia article.

Initial Evaluation

Pros

The tools

• seem to be quite powerful
• seem to be well integrated with each other
• seem to facilitate working in a distributed way well

Cons

There are more good tools by Atlassian (such as FishEye [providing real-time notifications of code changes plus web-based reporting, visualisation, search and code sharing] and Crucible [for code review]), but they don't support Bazaar as a source code repository (whereas JIRA and Bamboo do).

Launchpad

Not looked at yet in detail.

Launchpad is an open source software collaboration platform. They are provided by Canonical.

Tour: [1]

Launchpad provides the following tools:

• Bug tracking
• Code hosting using Bazaar
• Code reviews
• Ubuntu package building and hosting
• Translations
• Mailing lists
• Answer tracking and FAQs
• Specification tracking

We are already using the Translations feature for managing the translations of the texts of the openPETRA application.

Assembla Tool Suite

Not looked at yet in detail.

These tools are part of a commercial suite, but they are free for open source projects. They are provided by Assembla.

Features

• Ticketing
  • Issue and Bug tracking, linking with code and requirements, milestones (iterations or releases), managing an agile process, customer support.
• Collaboration
  • Wiki, file sharing, message boards, group chat with video.
• Management
  • Portfolios (a list of spaces or projects), permissions, time tracking and reports, managing teams.

Seem not to support Bazaar, at least after having a first look.

Separate tool: Free StandUp/Scrum Space