Trac - Developer management as it should be
Saturday, September 23rd, 2006Technologies are changing so quickly around us that it’s hard to find and integrate good software before its replacement has gone mainstream. For this reason, I’m always on the prowl for what’s new and hot.
A couple days ago, I was checking up on the status of Wordpress 2.1, which is supposed to have exciting new features like pseudo cron and spell checking. I came across Wordpress’s defect/feature management system, Trac. Just to be clear, Wordpress isn’t the author of Trac.
Right away, I’m drawn in by its simplicity. All of the links across the top, Wiki, Timeline, Roadmap, Browse Source, View Tickets, and Search, would be useful to me as a manager, developer, or outside observer.
Clicking on Timeline, I can see a summary of all of the modifications to the projects, including commits (check-ins/changesets) and ticket activity. Click on a changeset, and you even get to see the diffs between the old code and the new code. This is perfect for an enterprise environment where you want an overview of what other developers on your team are doing without having to do an SVN log and inspect each change. This web interface is much faster than Tortoise SVN’s GUI. Tickets are similar, showing every field that changed with each modification.
The Roadmap is exactly what every VP wants to see: a progress bar for each release to show his VP/CEO. When you click on a milestone, you even get to see the breakdown, by module, of progress in each module. Notice the links over every category/milestone? Click on it to see a color-coded list of items that fit that category. The color-coded list can have as many filters as you want. Try adding filters on the right-hand side for easy searching.
Like SFEE, Trac has a source code browser that looks almost exactly the same. I do like the formatting better in trac, but that’s probably a CSS issue.
Did I mention that every text field accepts wiki syntax? The wiki syntax is an enhanced version of the syntax that mediawiki uses, so most of us already know it. Having the built in wiki means that we can link our documentation to our changesets and commits. Wow. Just wow.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for on the site, there’s always the generic search feature. SFEE (what forge.joomla.org runs) really dropped the ball by not having a generic search feature that requires typing in one text field and clicking one button. Us developers are really impatient. Speaking of that, did you make it to the end of this article? 
Anyone have an installation of Trac they want to share with me?
October 16th, 2006 at 8:28 am
[...] Brent showed me a nice little project manager called trac I first ignored as I had to adjust my server to run it and discarded it but he kept talking about, even introduced it at his work. So I finally decided to take a closer look. [...]