Background:
I work for a small, 7-person Analytics/Consulting company. Originally, I was taken on to be a data analyst, but the needs of the company changed, and the principle requested I take up the role of Release Manager and QA tester. Note that my degree is in economics, not software.
My Problem
The biggest difficulty I've had stepping into this role is managing our projects. We currently do not use a bug tracker, we do not use a project management tool, and we are struggling to find an efficient way to produce release notes and communicate todos.
We have over 150 git repositories and at any given time, 50 are being developed on. On average, each project has 3 dependencies, each with a specific development or release version. I find this to be a bit overwhelming, and our current way of communicating is to talk or print notes.
This doesn't seem efficient or scalable. A further problem is that the principle is vehemently against using a bug tracker since we're small. I find that troublesome because it means we have no audit trail, and it makes keeping track of progress difficult for me.
Going Forward
Going forward, there are two big questions I'm trying to grapple with:
- How should I actually go about 'managing' our projects?
What technologies and concepts should I be familiarizing myself with to succeed in this role? Currently, I am somewhat familiar with the following tools:
- Ant
- Artifactory
- Git
- Grunt
- Jenkins
- Maven