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I'm currently using Codebase for all my project management (where I'm learning Agile). I use it for tracking bugs, user stories (via tickets), wikis, files and git hosting.

However, I'm looking to improve on this and find some tools better suited to things like bug tracking, managing stories, git hosting, collaboration, client feedback etc.

I'm part of a small team of 3 or 4 developers.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

My initial thoughts based on research was:

  • Project Management: JIRA
  • Bug Tracking: JIRA
  • User Stories and Agile: Pivotal Tracker
  • Git hosting: JIRA
  • Storage: Dropbox

However it seems this is quite disjointed in that it could prove more work than its worth.

Appreciate any advice on the above or tools which you've used and found work great for small-medium teams and suit Agile.

My SPECIFIC requirements are:

Bug tracking, managing stories, git hosting, remote team collaboration, client feedback, time tracking, storage, build management, project lifecycle progression data...

I also found Assembla which seems excellent. One of my team members believes in "the right tool for the job" and that there is no single tool to manage all of this. I was hoping for a central location.

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Why not use JIRA for "User Stories and Agile"? Since you already favour it for pm, issue tracking and code hosting? It's geared towards Scrum, it's not as lightweight as Pivotal Tracker, but if you are going to use it for everything else... And it can do minimal storage as well, you can attach files to issues / stories, what exactly are your needs? – Yannis Rizos♦ Jan 4 '12 at 12:51
Hi. My needs are as mentioned - bug tracking, user stories, git hosting, team collab, client feedback, storage. Thing is, I can do all this with codebasehq but it would seem there are far better tools for the job, not a one-size-fits-all piece of kit. – Zenph Jan 4 '12 at 12:54
Unless you state your requirements explicitly this will be closed as "not constructive" as you are just asking for people's opinions at the moment.# – ChrisF♦ Jan 4 '12 at 12:55
You can either go with specialized tools for each job, or a one-size-fits-all solution. Since you are now exploring Agile, you should put less emphasis on the tools, that's one of the core principles, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". If Codebase does what you want, don't bother with anything else. I'm using JIRA for everything, but there's no certainty it will work for you. Unless you're stuck on specific Codebase limitations, there is no point in looking elsewhere. – Yannis Rizos♦ Jan 4 '12 at 12:58
And adding to @ChrisF's comment, we don't really like questions that look like shopping recommendations. You have to be very specific on your requirements, otherwise everyone will just tell you about their favourite tool, and that won't help you much. – Yannis Rizos♦ Jan 4 '12 at 13:01
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1 Answer

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In our company we are currently running a similar configuration to the one you have proposed, so I'll give my insights.

Last year we moved to JIRA to handle most of our development support requirements. We have a distributed team across multiple countries, and we needed a strong set of support systems to keep our development running smoothly.

We love JIRA and it is very flexible, and it nearly met all of our needs. The base Jira system handles issue tracking very well. GreenHopper works awesomely for agile planning, and the integration with base JIRA works really well (issues can be estimated and have time tracked on them, which are reflected real time in burn down charts). Bamboo can be used for deploys and automated testing. The Confluence wikis are very powerful and are good for centralising documentation. We can export articles as PDF if we need to distribute them externally, and they are very nicely formatted.

We were not as pleased with the VCS hosting, Crucible reviews and Fisheye. Performance was very poor, and the interfaces were hard to use and cumbersome. Recently we decided to move the code side of things over to GitHub and we have found what we believe is the best solution for us right now. JIRA supports GitHub push notifications on commits, so commits can appear on tickets inside JIRA. We also built command line tools for commenting and adding time to JIRA tickets, as well as creating pull requests in GitHub, so our developers can do a lot of things without leaving the command line.

We also use Google+ hangouts for meetings and collaboration, and we are very happy with this. People can jump in in the web browser, and everyone can screen share, use a shared whiteboard and use Google docs inside the hangout.

We are currently very pleased with this solution and I would highly recommend it.

  • Issue tracking: JIRA]
  • Agile: GreenHopper (JIRA)
  • Wiki/Documentation: Confluence (JIRA)
  • Builds/Testing/Deploy: Bamboo (JIRA)
  • VCS hosting (git): GitHub (Private repos available, integrates with JIRA)
  • Code reviews: GitHub (Using pull requests)
  • Collaboration/meetings: Google+ hangouts
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