Ahoy and greetings, GameDev.net. Anyone here have a project management tool (preferably an online one) that they think is just the bee's knees? I have looked at Backpack and it's sister Basecamp, and both look nice, but I was wondering if anyone has something better suited to game development with a small team (2-6 people).

Excel. Excel rocks! Excel is "the man."

Excel makes me vomit.

Trac is... adequate.

I've searched and searched for a project management tool that fulfils my needs, and have come to the conclusion that if you want something doing properly you should damn well do it yourself.

Quote: Original post by hymerman
...if you want something doing properly you should damn well do it yourself.

A fine ideal, but who has time to time to create Project Management solutions when you're trying to make a game?

"Project Management" is a very broad field.

Many companies have corporate mandates telling what you must use. In that case, you should use those.

I've used and seen it used, but I just don't like MS Project because makes a lot of assumptions aren't necessarily true. If everybody is paid or billed by the hour, and all people (resources) are able to do the same amount of work at the same rate, then it becomes a better tool.

DevTrack is useful when finishing up a project and also working on bugs, but it isn't really a good general purpose project management tool.

I really like the scrum development methodology, and there are some reasonably good tools tools out there (like ScrumWorks) to help keep your sprint organized. Their data analysis tools are mediocre, but the data can be exported and pasted into Excel...

Which brings us back to what Tom said:

Excel is wonderful.

Filters can clean up who owns what aspects of the project. They can organize what is done, what is impeded, what is in progress, and what is not started.

Excel has 'sharing' options available that let multiple people work on a document, lock it, and keep shared copies in sync as it runs.

Pivot tables (the most awesomely powerful tool in Excel) can do just about anything you want for your scheduling. Use it to sort tasks, expand and shrink clusters of tasks, sort, subsort, filter, and so on.


Pivot tables are awesome for just about everything in program analysis. This past week I have been using pivot tables for analyzing the profiler output for execution hotspots. Two weeks ago I used pivot tables and map files to find and eliminate unusually large blocks within the .text, .data, and .bss segments of the app. A few weeks before that I used pivot tables with our map files to figure out which library modules contributed the most size to our executable.

Excel is an oft-undervalued tool.

Wikipedia to the rescue. As usual with these business oriented programs the best ones are usually commercial.

Because you didn't specify what exact functionality you want in your PM tool, I'll list a tool for online collaboration that is quite good but might not be exactly what you were thinking of: Skype. You can't get your online co-developers into a face-to-face meeting, email has a time delay, and chat/IM lacks the visual dimension, so video conferencing software should considerably enhance your project management.

In the end, project management is about 50% soft skills anyway, at least according to a project manager that held a presentation in one of my classes yesterday :D

Free? DotProject.

Quote: Original post by Edward Ropple
Free? DotProject.

This.

Quote: Original post by tstrimp

Quote: Original post by Edward Ropple
Free? DotProject.

This.

I'll second this, I've used it before with a online group and it is very handy for keeping things straight.