Tuesday 3 April 2007

Development Tools

Having looked more into these development tools and this is my recommendations for going forward.

Issue Tracking.
Although Jira is a great tool and I highly recommend it, the expense is perhaps too great for somthing that has not been used in an organisation before, and therefore the benefits may not be known.

I will be looking closely at Gemini (http://www.countersoft.com/Default.aspx?PageID=10). It has a free 10 user configuration and seems, at least on the surface, to be a very effective and comparible tool. I'll let you know how it goes.

Version Control
After reading up about Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, I have decided not to go with this product either. There are more than several reports on its viability on large databases of code.

I will also be looking at Subversion. I hear its not as simple to use as SourceSafe but is free and has some very strong support amongst others I know. One quote I had was "I even resorted to reading the [words deleted here for family reading] manual, but now I understand it, its really good and simple to use".

Again, I'll keep you posted on how things pan out. If you have any comments or suggestions I'd love to hear from you.