Tool to manage programming task, ideas, tests, etc

[Kempelen]

Hi,

In my daily basic I follow an order of ideas and things to do. I write all of them in a txt file when they cames to my mind, but it looks to me this starts to be an unusable way to management all the development tasks. I mainly note ideas, priority, notes, dates, test reports and results, even code or bugs. Now the management of a txt file is not very agile. I would like to know how you keep track of all these things and what tool do you use. I would like you to advise me of methods and tools to organize your job in a easy way or explain how do you do it. Something simple but complete, if these is possible.

Thanks in advance.
FS

[Dann Corbit]

For tracking software development issues, Mantis is nice:
http://www.mantisbt.org/

I use my email calendar to schedule tasks, meetings and appointments.

I use Microsoft Office Project to track projects on the big scale.

I don't know of any tool set that does everything effectively.

[bhlangonijr]

Hi,

In my daily basic I follow an order of ideas and things to do. I write all of them in a txt file when they cames to my mind, but it looks to me this starts to be an unusable way to management all the development tasks. I mainly note ideas, priority, notes, dates, test reports and results, even code or bugs. Now the management of a txt file is not very agile. I would like to know how you keep track of all these things and what tool do you use. I would like you to advise me of methods and tools to organize your job in a easy way or explain how do you do it. Something simple but complete, if these is possible.

Thanks in advance.
FS

Hi Fermin.

In case you are not familiar with a software development methodology I think you will find useful to learn some of it first. IMO an agile software development model is very adhering to your project specifics (If we are talking about Rodin Chess Engine Project).
Tools:
I don't know a "all-in-one" tool set to manage all project life cycle. I have a list of project management tools of my personal preference I chose after experimenting many others:

Project management and bug tracker:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/
Alternative: Mantis or Bugzilla http://www.bugzilla.org/

Plans, resource allocation, task dependencies, etc:
Microsoft Project
Alternative: Planner http://live.gnome.org/Planner

Control project development tasks, resources, etc:
http://www.dotproject.net/

Regards,

[mjlef]

Post-It notes!

[MattieShoes]

MSVC++ has a nice thing, it builds to-do lists from comments in the code that have "//TODO: " in them, so I tend to write the notes in the part of the code that need the work.

[bhlangonijr]

MSVC++ has a nice thing, it builds to-do lists from comments in the code that have "//TODO: " in them, so I tend to write the notes in the part of the code that need the work.

Doxygen is a great source code documentation tool generator having the same functionality "@todo" (and much more) with the big advantage that you can keep using your favorite C/C++ editor.

http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/

[andretaff]

MSVC++ has a nice thing, it builds to-do lists from comments in the code that have "//TODO: " in them, so I tend to write the notes in the part of the code that need the work.

Eclipse does this too

[ilari]

I'd say that the most important tool for managing a big software project is a good version control system with easy branching, preferably something distributed like Git. I'm still keeping a separate todo list, but I can easily create new branches for new features, test them separately or combine the branches, and of course merge all the final changes in the master branch.

If you have just one working copy of your source tree, or create manual copies for big features, it's sooner or later going to become a real pain to work on several ideas at the same time and keep track of all the changes. Pretty much every "real" programmer uses some kind of a VCS. Chess engine developers should too.

[steffan]

For managing ideas and concepts, a mind mapping tool like FreeMind can be useful.

Cheers,
Steffan

[Kempelen]

Hello,

I have been looking at the tools mentioned in this thread. At first they look very "serius" to me. Tools like Mantis, Bugzilla, .... requieres to install a web server, php, and so on, and their functionality is more for an enterprise or team development requierements that for a simple programmer like me.

At the end I have found the tool for me. It is ToDolist. It is a software to keep track of task. What I like is that you can use comments of each task to note everything. There are also other very usefull field, like version where you can track what versions have new features. Also the field Status is very usefull. I have set "Idea","In progress", "In test", "Released", etc. All task can be organized by priority and there is the option to make subnotes.

This is what I wanted, a tool simple but effective. Ant it is freeware!!! Also it has a lot of features.

Regards,

Download at : http://www.abstractspoon.com/
Review here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applicati ... list2.aspx