Updated: 2020-04-06 I self-hosted taiga to plan my own project progress, and it feels pretty good for personal use: Sharing some of my self-hosted services.
In pure software project progress management there are two main participants: the project manager, who plans the schedule; and the programmer, who completes tasks according to the schedule.
For managers: they want software that can assign tasks quickly, receive feedback quickly, add members conveniently, control project priorities, and plan each iteration. In addition, completed progress should ideally be exportable as reports.
For programmers: they just want to receive tasks, complete them and submit. They don’t want any other relationship with management. As a simple programmer, I even just want to see a task, code it, and commit it to the repository, hoping the management system can automatically detect the task submission. That way I don’t have to log into the management page again to declare my task finished.
Several of these tools support Slack; I list them here too.
Below there are also some management tools not aimed at software development, focusing on web-based software.
TAPD
This is Tencent’s project management software. During my internship I had the fortune of using it. Powerful features — Tencent’s internal development uses it too. If a project has no constraints at all, TAPD is the obvious choice. In the future, if I devote myself to open source software, I think I would definitely use TAPD.
Taiga
This is software written with Django+Postgresql. Its biggest advantage is being open source, with integrations for Github
and Gitlab; people also provide a Docker version, suitable for internal deployment. Compared with TAPD‘s fine-grained planning,
this software is a bit rough, and I didn’t see anything about iterations.
Slack can be used.
Redmine
Open source software based on Ruby; a Docker version is also provided. I tried setting it up — many features, but
I felt I couldn’t make use of them. Maybe I’m not a qualified project manager; I’m not very sensitive to many of the features.
ZenTao
It also has an open source edition; the features are a bit too many, and many people develop plugins for it. From a quick look at the docs, this is a large all-in-one software; driving this behemoth also takes considerable time.
teambition
Solid and conventional; the software is basically sufficient, and the collaboration features are good too.
tower
After trying it, I found it quite refreshing. You can try it here. It is neither open source nor free, but I can understand that — it really is an excellent system.
worktile
Like tower, it’s also beautiful and gives an easy-to-use feeling. It supports binding many services, including Git usage — you can tell the team put a lot of heart into it.
Not open source, just free to use. Visit worktile to try it.
Slack
In the end I tried Slack once more. It is not a project management tool — it’s a chat group.
This is an enterprise-level chat tool; for its specific advantages see Zhihu.
You can use existing services with it, such as Github, Google Calendar, and push notifications from project management tools.
You can coordinate your own work, split into different sections, and you only need to focus on your own section, or one item in a big channel; you can also choose to mute at any time to keep yourself in peace.