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Project management the open source way

Posted by russb78 on · 5 comments
Linux User & Developer magazine; By Dmitri Popov
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Track projects and collaborate efficiently within an easy-to-use open source project management application called Collabtive. Resident collaboration expert, Dmitri Popov, shows you how to get started…

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Comments (5)

I see a lot of these open source "project management" thingies. Trac, this one, several others. But none of them has any way to look at the actual code, or look at some measures of the state of the code.

I would like to see a "project manager" that integrates schedule, milestones, PERT and GANT charts, version control and views into the code like statCVS provides (http://statcvs.sourceforge.net/). But even statCVS doesn't do things like a time vs code base cyclomatic complexity.

I'm sure there's a place for the "project management" systems that exist, but they don't seem to add in the right stuff. They leave managers with a schedule and lots of pretty tables, but no views into the actual code.
Dunno, where I work the managers would not know what any of the code meant, so no real value there.

Might be handy for smaller teams though that manage their own time.
@phsolide: Collabtive isn't an application to manage open source projects. It's an open source application to manage any kind of project and seems mostly tageted at non-programming projects. Hence the lack of source code management.

But how do you mean that Trac does not let you look at the actual code? Trac is integrated with Subversion. You can view files, revisions, etcetera and link them to tickets, wiki pages and what-not.
I took a look at Trac. I agree that it's "integrated" with Subversion. But what I want is some nice charts showing, say, cyclomatic complexity per kilo-line of source code. Or a graph showing number of lines of source code with time. statCVS does some of this, as I mentioned above. There's tons of data in your average version control repository that the PM systems ignore.

We know that code metrics like SLOC aren't the greatest, but they're something. Any given metic (McCabe complexity, cyclomatic complexity, whatever the object oriented metics are, branch coverage) can fool you. But if a technical manager has all that on a nice neat webpage in graphical form, it might give their intuition a fighting chance to warn them if a project is going awry.

Also, if you do per-developer checkin stats, like statCVS does, maybe you as a PM can compliment people doing lots of work.
@phsolide: In that case, take a look at CruiseControl and phpUnderControl (a CruiseControl plugin for PHP development). It does all you ask for and more.

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