Pier Project for development team Collaboration

I using ProjectPier for my team collaboration, almost one year, and i will show you it’s good and bad sides.

The Project Pier is ActiveCollab successor. ActiveCollab was free for download, but when they decided to go commercial, Project Pier team take ActiveCollab’s code and now they work on its development. In core this is still old ActiveCollab, but it is quite good.

The Project Pier features:

ProjectPier is solution you install on your own host, and you have absolutely control.
ProjectPier is created to provide easy to use solution
It organize dev projects into projects, milestones, Tasklist, Task and Files
Search project by tags
E-mail notifications for new Milestones, Messages, Tasklists, Tasks and Files.
Unlimited number of projects, tasklist and Project members
You can add your sponsors, stockholders into project so tehy can track project development too
It is free and open sourced solution

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Great place to store your code

My last article was about revision control systems, but we didn’t talk about hosting for central repository. If developers team is located in the office, then you will put the repository at the LAN, but when your team have need to work over Internet, and your developers are dislocated, then you need host repository at the web, so team members can access it, and pull changes from it or create copied repository wherever they are.

What kind of hosting do you need ? You need hosting with revision control systems support. If you using Mercurial, then you need host with Mercurial installed on it, if you using Subversion you need hosting with it.

Assembla

I will never promote some product or service, unless i think this is very useful for my readers. I was looking for hosting with revision control systems on it, to host my project on it, and i find out a great one. It is Assembla, place where you can store and track your code changes, and collaborate with you team. You can create as many workspaces / projects at the Assmebla as you need. If you want to make your workspace private / commercial, you will need to pay for workspace, but if your project is open sourced then it is free, but you need to know that your files will be available at the web. Continue reading →

Pro Developer tested NetBEans 6.5 Beta

NetBeans 6.5 Beta

Today I installed NetBeans 6.5 Beta, after many years using Zend IDE for PHP development. I download NetBeand with PHP pack only. NetBeans 6.5 start up was much faster than Zend, and working with NetBeans was very smootly. Both IDE’s running under Java platform, but Zend is lazy in comparation with NetBeans IDE.

NetBeans is open source, free and you can download NetBeans pack you need. If you developing only php then you don’t need Java or Ruby pack. But if sometimes you want to extend NetBeans, you don’t need to download new package, just extend it with plugins. I might extend my NetBeans with UML pack, because i want to create UML diagrams when analyzing projects.

What i liked the most?
NetBeans have support for Version Control and developer collaboration. You don’t want that your team member overlap someone else codes, do you? You can choose between CVS, Subversion, or Mercurial subversion control systems, i using CVS. You can connect on CVS with pserver, ext, local and fork authentication protocols.

Line based diff viewer wil show you new, changed and removed code lines. You can compare two files, file from repository and your local file side by side.

You can see local history, and roll back into older file version any time if needed. All changes are saved into file history while you developing. Continue reading →

Let’s kill the bugs

If your development team have more then one person, you will need some collaboration tool to improve team coherence. I love this kind of tools, they help me to improve progress, work and cooperation in team. There is a lot of great products, but this time i want to focus only at the bugs tracking. The 16bugs is nice web tool for tracking bugs on your projects.

After registration, you can create you company account, and include your team into this company, by inviting people to register on 16bugs. You can create projects, and give permissions to people to view or submit bugs.

Every bug can be assigned to some team member, with status and priority. Status can be: “Verified”, “Solving”, “Testing”, “Testing Passed”, “Duplicate”, “Solved” or “Discarded”. You can sort bugs by category or software version. Continue reading →