World wide collaboration

July 1, 2008 by marioale

These days, many large scattered development teams work in medium to very large projects all over the world. This is what's going on for most open source project teams and with companies with geographically distributed teams.

This is the world wide collaboration development era. There's the need for a suitable collaboration software that provides the tools, ease of use and scalability that those teams demand.

At my university, we used GForge open source version ( http://gforge.org ), so I looked at GForge AS from GForge Group ( http://gforgegroup.com ) when I joined my current company in Argentina. They have the older open source version and two newer versions, the free Express Edition and the full Advanced Server. This is an enterprise-grade collaborative development management software, brought by the same people that created SourceForge and GForge open source.

I'd like to point out some features we like and helped alot on our daily work:

Full-blown Tracker/Code Integration

It provides a powerful tracker with Subversion/CVS integration. It does all that the basics, but also offers some advanced features that, in my case, have found very useful: you can define rules on when commits can be made, or define re-assignments or changes when commits are made, etc.

Workflow, well beyond the basics

Workflow features let you change or reassign tracker items when source code commits are made, and have these changes cascade to other workflow rules that can, in turn change other fields or reassign the item again.

Eclipse, MS project and Visual Studio plugins

Those who work with Eclipse or VS will benefit with the plugins. You can do a lot of the usual management stuff without leaving your environment.

Permission Management

There's an easy interface for the project administrator to set up roles and who is assigned those roles in the project. Each role can have unique permissions in individual trackers, forums, source code trees, etc.

If you want to try it and see if it works for you, you can download a VM from their site and start playing with it right away.

Permalink