Project Management System

1. We really needed a way to manage our projects efficiently and utilize some of the most common practices of an Enterprise level project management structure, without the EL price tag. So we found Unfuddle.com, one of the really solid project management and source control hosted services out there, which as their modo states, really helped us do things right. We were able to have a ticketing system, milestones, messaging board, shared wiki, Git source control hosting, and now time tracking all in one system for less than $50 a month.

One of the big factors that helped our decision on Unfuddle to be an easy one was the fact that their system is backed by Amazons’ secure and stable AWS service. So not only does their entire service run on a proven & scalable infrastructure but you can also back up your entire source repositories to your own S3 buckets for even more data backup and piece of mind.  

**Feature request ;) one of the big things for us that would be great is to have some sort of built in Agile features into Unfuddle such as burndown charts and cards and stories, but for now we just create custom reports to help us organize our tickets in the different stages of an agile development cycle. And there is the great Unfuddle API, which you can access to build on any additional functionality you need on your own internal site.

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Source Version Control System (Git)

2. Now Git is an awesome distributed source control system but it can also have quite a learning curve. So we found a very easy to use program called SmartGit that runs on Mac OSX and Windows.  You can get a individual licenses for $65 or less depending on license quantity. This is the best gui out there for Git hands down! It allows you to perform all the essential functions of Git from commits, push, fetch, branching (which is amazingly easy btw), to merges and easily switching working branches back and forth. Oh, it also visually shows and highlights diff comparisons on a text-based file in your repository! This is similar to features that you would see in a well-known version control system called Perforce.

One of the really great things about the Unfuddle system is Git hosting and you can tie your commits from Smart Git to tickets in your Unfuddle system easily by using a small set of powerful keywords in the commit message. You can resolve and close a ticket, link the current commit to a ticket, and track time on tickets. That’s big. To be able to open a ticket in Unfuddle and view the exact commit changes to the files that you have pushed to Unfuddle from SmartGit is simply great! It even shows the highlighted differences on each file that was committed.

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Integration into IDE

3. We are a flex development firm so we use Flash Builder and to be able to have integration with Git inside the IDE that you work in is great. So we use EGit, an eclipse plug-in, which allows Flash Builder to be aware of your git repository, and perform most of the Git commands right from the IDE (very efficient). So you can view history on a file from within the IDE, mark new files to be controlled by Git, etc. (The EGit URL for eclipse is http://www.jgit.org/updates)

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