Wednesday, June 20, 2007

A Project Management Epiphany

We hired a friend of mine in October of last year to help with sales and programming. He's moved to programming full time, and I've taken on the role of Project Manager since. I still do code, but my focus is on code architecture now. Since then, I've been learning the ropes of project management, and I've been looking for tools to help me with the job.

We were already using Subversion for revision management, and upon hiring Garvin, we've added Flspray for road mapping and task management. Its really a task management system in and of itself. I've recently come across Crucible for code review. This is quite a gem! It integrates with Subversion in such a way that you can mark revisions and and effected files for code review. Invited participants may start threads within your code, with each thread relating to specific lines of code that are simply highlight. It's very slick for organizing code review, especially with out-of-office employees.

The thing it was missing to me was integration with a project management system like Flyspray. Well, how would it integrate with something like that without them having to write a project management system specifically for Crucible? It wouldn't be simple. Then it struck me; why not have a feed daemon for Flyspray the same way Subversion has svn:/? A standard could even be made that multiple task management systems could use and thus be integrated easily with other applications like Crucible. I just don't think RSS feeds are enough, because it only goes one way. Is there something out there that already does this? If not, I'm tempted to write up a specification and daemon.