I'm remotely managing a team of about 10 persons, and it becomes difficult to track every task and its status. I'm looking for a solution for task tracking. There are already a few of such applications which seem to respond to my needs:
Does anyone have any experience using these products? Do you know alternative solutions (preferably not SaaS)?
Based on my own experience I would recommend Jira or Mantis.
Jira is a paying solution but is by far the best I have used.
It has agile plugins like greenhopper, ideal for visualising the workflow on cards.
A free solution that might work:
Mantis is a open source bug tracking solution that works very well.
If you're trying to track all the tasks, I'd recommend using AgileZen, Pivotal Tracker or Trello.
AgileZen/Trello are both 'cardwall' implementations. I've not used Trello yet, but it looks like it's a bit slicker than Agile Zen.
AgileZen is much closer to a true kanban implementation; allowing work in progress limits, blocks, and ready to pull state. However it doesn't allow me to put rules of engagement on the board in an easy way.
Because you can expand the size of the board horizontally as far as you want, AgileZen/Trello are both good choices when work has a lot of hand offs (say your designer needs to do some work, then hand it to the executive, who rubber stamps it who hands it to the tech lead who designs it who gives it to the developers who code it who give it to QA who confirm it who give it to ops to deploy it)
Obviously that scenario is sub optimal. Thankfully kanban systems allow you to track how long cards stay stuck in different parts of the work flow. Now instead of wondering why it takes 3 weeks to get something from design to production, you can see where tasks are getting stuck! Hooray!
Pivotal Tracker is great if you are already running super lean. If you take a task and deploy it within a few hours to a day, then you should just use pivotal tracker. It's super smooth and clean.
I have been hearing good things about Trello from Fog Creek. Clean, simple, and useful interface for getting things done.
CollabNET , the makers of Subversion provides a paid project collaboration solution using Agile methods. You can start off with a hosted solution in a few minutes and then move over to onsite deployment if you want to. For a team of 10 people, I would just keep it hosted. Cost is reasonable. The software isn't very useful for planning but, it provides a path of least resistance for developers / analysts / QA to collaborate with each other and with other stakeholders with automatic tracking, notifications and action items. It has significant amount of monitoring capabilities and dashboards. It also allows you to setup projects in a parent child relationship where you can assign membership on a project basis and expose only what you need to, on a role basis.
I am not related to CollabNet in any way. I just administrated CollabNet for a team of about 50 people and a few smaller projects.
I recently did wrote a question about Time Tracking software that would be useful in situation similar to yours. You could find the post here. A few helpful answers did come out. Most of those people answered suggested a software that's exactly for your needs (time tracking plus task tracking, financing, invoicing and so on).
I hope that one will turn what you are looking for.
Best Regards, Sve
If you wish to track completion, and focus on delegation, "portfolio" of tasks, and grouping of tasks (on projects or subprojects), advanced task managers can do the trick. For more advanced needs I would say Jira as well
I personnaly tried : - http://www.getflow.com/ : really nice, but not free - http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/ quite nice, free, cross platform
You can try Team Task Manager. We use it daily to track projects and tasks for 20 employees. The software is very intuitive and there is no learning curve. Free eval is here - http://www.deskshare.com/team-task-management.aspx
Best tool we use for Task tracking - which is not necessarily issue tracking or bug tracker but rather general purpose task tracker - is Manymoon.
This is a free App -that comes bundled with Google Apps.
It allows set of people profiles to be maintained (built-in with Google Apps) - it allows projects to be created and associate different users to be part of different mails.
It has a social networking kind of feel for collaboration and one can issue tasks from email itself with follow up.
Dipan.
I'd recommend TSheets (http://www.tsheets.com). It looks like a task tracking software that might work perfectly for your team... good luck!
We've tried different solutions and always end up back at Google Docs. We have a template we use in a spread sheet and find it's so easy to communicate through there with columns for things like: Date added; Who added the task; Assigned to; Element; Issue; Screen shot; Link; Status; Priority... It works really well for us.
Here is a good list where you can start (filter non web)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_project_management_software
I have used Assembla for a while and loved it but it is web based.
Well, it's SaaS, but we love it - Unfuddle. Tickets of work, custom reports, milestones, simple collaboration tools (notebooks and messages) and subversion repository built in. And it's pretty cheap.
