Thursday, July 23, 2009

Project Management for Small Teams

Ok, well the team here at the DroolFactory is one for now but we can dream. That said, even with a small team, with a feature rich application on a new platform in a new language and new SDK, needs to perform some project management.

Am I overkilling this obsession to write my own code in my limited spare time? Probably, but here is how I am handling it and why.

I'm a reader of Joel on Software (if you don't read it and you code or work in a software design shop then you should try it out; take a min and head on over and sign up for his RSS feed, don't worry I'll wait) and some time ago Joel annouced that his company Fog Creek Software was releasing a new product; FogBugz for software tracking.

The best part is that they also provide a version they host on their servers called FogBugz On Demand which is free for students and startups (1-2 users). I fall under the startups of 1 to...ya right just 1 user, so I decided to bring it up and try it out to track the work on my current project.

I am really impressed with FogBugz. It is serving my purposes and allowing me to perform estimates without a lot of Excel wizardry which is giving me an idea of what features are going to cost. For a Dad of two, working a day job, limited time comes in about 1-3 hours per night of coding which is way too much and I need to cut back, but don't we all?

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