Are there any free tools that implement evidence-based scheduling like Joel talks about? There is FogBugz, of course, but I am looking for a simple and free tool that can apply EBS on some tasks that I give estimates (and actual times which are complete) for.
FogBugz is free for up to 2 users by the way. As far I know this is the only tool that does EBS.
See here http://www.workhappy.net/2008/06/get-fogbugz-for.html
According to Wikipedia, Fogbugz is the only product currently offering EBS.
Related
Where can I find a practical example on how to use Bug, Risk, Scenario, Task and Quality of Service Requirement work items?
On MSDN documentation I found this topic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb668962.aspx but it is not enough for me to deeply understand when to use one or the other.
Thanks!
I don't think there is a single prescriptive way of using the work items. You have to adjust this to your own process and your own needs and primarily decide what you want to get out of TFS a this particular process template.
A good place to start might be the literature on agile methodology, for example:
User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development
Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum
We are currently evolving our development processes in an effort to become CMMI compliant (we will start with level 2, and move up from there). We are trying to locate a tool that is inexpensive (or free) that will allow us to develop requirements in the spirit of CMMI. In other words, we need to be able to enter our requirements, track changes to them, provide alerts to individuals when requirements change, perform traceability, etc. Our projects are typically small (typically 3 - 7 developers and a tester or two).
We have looked at many of the commercial tools, but they cost more than we are able to afford. We looked at a few on SourceForge (OSRM and others) but could not find anything that was sufficiently mature that also had the features that we needed.
We are looking for suggestions for a tool that meets the above requirements.
INCOSE is an excellent resource for this sort of question. They maintain a Tools Database that indexes COTS and GOTS System Engineering tools. Some of the tools that perform requirements management also have high-level System Eng functionality (CORE, for example) whereas others are more narrowly-focused (i.e. RequistePro).
Most of these tools will cost money, but may provide some limited free functionality. Workspace.com, for example, provides some free functionality. I would recommend against rolling your own solution, or adapting a tool that is not specifically intended for requirements management, because the hidden cost of getting it going, as well as inefficiency at the intended task could become burdensome.
If you absolutely can't afford to spend any money on a requirements tool, it would be better to use the free functionality from a commercial tool. But don't do that... pony up the cash for RequisitePro and sleep better knowing that you're getting the right tool for the job.
How about starting of with a Wiki? We use TWiki but there are many others available. The wiki we uses
sends an email when any pages change
stores the history of changes to each page
by using the auto-linking of wikis you can create a hierarchy of requirements
This seems to cover most of your items. Wikis like TWiki have plugins which may also help you.
If you only have 3-7 developers on a project using one of the big commercial tools may be far too complex for what you need.
We're heavily into CMMI at our company, but all of our tools are developed in-house.
All I can recommend is to develop your own tools. You will at least have the advantage that it will reflect your business process.
In general, for a new tool, we start off with a tool developed on a project, which is then shared with the rest of the company, if it has been successful. Don't be afraid to use Excel to trace your requirements along with a statuts, which along with a good change control system, such as subversion, gives you a lot of traceability.
A team in the company I used to work for was working on customizing Visual Studio Team System work item templates to handle requirements tracking. One goal, which you should consider as well, was to enable traceability from requirements through to developer work items and then defects. This enables some powerful analysis of which requirements are tied to the most defects.
Which search engine would you recommend for a Commerce website?
We have millions of products in a catalog and we want it to be as quick as possible.
We would also want to make sure that the marketing driven through the search engine will be fast and effective.
What are your opinions?
This is only half the answer to your question. I've used it with Java and not .NET. Fast is said to be the better search engine. I don't know. However for Commerce Endeca is considered to be the best. I've used it with a catalog of 5Mil. products and queries are very very fast.
If you use .NET or Java does not matter in the end solution the Search Engine stays the same.
And what search engine to be used is not answered easily. it all depends on what you want/can spend. My experiences with Endeca are very positive.
We've been using Endeca for several .NET ecommerce website, surely I think it give us faster full text search with little coding in compare with SQL Server, but Endeca is over complexity, it cost us lots of time to update and configure. Its query capability is quite limited, it lacks of flexibility as we get used to with SQL query.
I'm going to reduce Endeca dependency by utilize Lucene.Net for search part.
I have been involved in several .NET implementations of Endeca and have been happy every time. The biggest advantage of Endeca over FAST is the cost and time of implementation.
My recommendation is to document your requirements and send out an RFP. Make sure you include the following as part of the RFP:
A demo of the proposed solution (make
sure they clearly explain within the
Demo what features are included in
the cost of the proposal and what
features cost extra).
Examples of existing customers that
have implemented this solution on top
of the same commerce software you are
using.
Software Licensing cost (you will
need to provide details about the
number of records you have in your
commerce catalog as both companies
price based on this)
A detailed list of available modules
/ plugins and their respective costs.
Implementation cost.
Implementation schedule.
Hope this helps.
Endeca is the best commercial product in my own honest opinion. We've been using it for our millions of catalogs data.
Or you can try Lucene.NET
One thing to consider before buying Endeca is that Oracle licenses the product by physical CPU present in a server. So if you were considering virtualizing Endeca servers into a VCE or other blade virtualization server, you would have to pay for licenses for all of the CPUs blades in the appliance, even if you were only utilizing one of them for Endeca. This makes Endeca only suitable for physical server installations, strictly because of Oracle licensing issues.
I think Cacti is great except for the fact that it takes hours to configure it. There is a lot that you can do with it but I find it a little overly complicated. A script collecting disk utilization recently broke on me (for no apparent reason), I spent 3 hours and got no where.
I would like a tool like Cacti but super easy to setup. I have some familiarity wit RRD so a little bit of manual work is okay.
To make this more programming related: An alternative to a different software package would be to develop something custom built. Has anybody attempted this? What pieces to you use to built which parts?
There are a slew of tools out there:
Cacti
Ganglia
Zabbix
Hyperic
Monit
Reconnoiter
Graphite
Each focus on different aspects of usability. Reconnoiter and Graphite were born out of specialized needs and wanting greater resolution than RRD can provide.
I suggest you do take another look at Cacti before building yourself. Create templates in cacti for your hosts and your graphs. Then use the built in CLI tools to automate. This way for each host, you do not need to click through the GUI.
I think this is what I want:
http://collectd.org
Collectd in combination with drraw looks like it will fit my needs.
I don't know if this will meet your needs, but you might also want to look at RRDUtil:
http://www.tnpi.biz/internet/manage/rrdutil/
Unfortunately they are all very time-consuming to learn and configure. You have to spend time to understand all the principles used and read sample configurations.
No short-cuts on this chore :-D
We use gmond and ganglia.
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Is there anyone working solo and using fogbugz out there? I'm interested in personal experience/overhead versus paper.
I am involved in several projects and get pretty hammered with lots of details to keep track of... Any experience welcome.
(Yes I know Mr. Joel is on the stackoverflow team... I still want good answers :)
I use it, especially since the hosted Version of FugBugz is free for up to 2 people. I found it a lot nicer than paper as I'm working on multiple projects, and my paper tends to get rather messy once you start making annotations or if you want to re-organize and shuffle tasks around, mark them as complete only to see that they are not complete after all...
Plus, the Visual Studio integration is really neat, something paper just cannot compete with. Also, if you lay the project to rest for 6 months and come back, all your tasks and notes are still there, whereas with paper you may need to search all the old documents and notes again, if you did not discard it.
But that is just the point of view from someone who is not really good at staying organized :-) If you are a really tidy and organized person, paper may work better for you than it does for me.
Bonus suggestion: Run Fogbugz on a second PC (or a small Laptop like the eeePC) so that you always have it at your fingertips. The main problem with Task tracking programs - be it FogBugz, Outlook, Excel or just notepad - is that they take up screen space, and my two monitors are usually full with Visual Studio, e-Mail, Web Browsers, some Notepads etc.
Go to http://www.fogbugz.com/ then at the bottom under "Try It", sign up.
under Settings => Your FogBugz Hosted Account, it should either already say "Payment Information: Using Student and Startup Edition." or there should be some option/link to turn on the Student and Startup Edition.
And yes, it's not only for Students and Startups, I asked their support :-)
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with FogCreek and Joel did not just deposit money in my account.
When I was working for myself doing my consulting business I signed up for a hosted account and honestly I couldn't have done without it.
What I liked most about it was it took 30 seconds to sign up for an account and I was then able to integrate source control using sourcegear vault (which is an excellent source control product and free for single developers) set up projects, clients, releases and versions and monitor my progress constantly.
One thing that totally blew me away was that I ended up completely abandoning outlook for all work related correspondence. I could manage all my client interactions from within fogbugz and it all just worked amazingly well.
In terms of overhead, one of the nice things you could do was turn anything into a case. Anything that came up in your mind while you were coding, you simply created a new email, sent it to fogbugz and it was instantly added as an item for review later.
I would strongly recommend you get yourself one of the hosted accounts and give it a whirl
In addition to the benefits already mentioned, another nice feature of using FogBugz is BugzScout, which you can use to report errors from your app and log them into FogBugz automatically. If you're a one person team, chances are there are some bugs in your code you've never seen during your own testing, so it's nice to have those bugs found "in the wild" automatically reported and logged for you.
I use it as well and quite frankly wouldn't want to work without it.
I've always had some kind of issue tracker available for the projects I work on and thus am quite used to updating it. With FB6 the process is now even better.
Since FB also integrates with Subversion, the source control tool I use for my projects, the process is really good and I have two-way links between the two systems now. I can click on a case number in the Subversion logs and go to the case in FB, or see the revisions bound to a case inside FB.
I think it's great that Joel et al. let people use FogBugs hosted for free on their own. It's a great business strategy, because the users become fans (it is great software after all), and then they recommend it to their businesses or customers.
Yea FogBugz is great for process-light, quick and easy task management. It seems especially well suited for soloing, where you don't need or want a lot of complexity in that area.
By the way, if you want to keep track of what you're doing at the computer all day, check out TimeSprite, which integrates with FogBugz. It's a Windows app that logs your active window and then categorizes your activity based on the window title / activity type mappings you define as you go. (You can also just tell it what you're working on.) And if you're a FogBugz user, you can associate your work with a FogBugz case, and it will upload your time intervals for that case. This makes accurate recording of elapsed time pretty painless and about as accurate as you can get, which in turn improves FogBugz predictive powers in its evidence-based scheduling. Also, when soloing, I find that such specific logging of my time keeps me on task, in the way a meandering manager otherwise might. (I'm not affiliated with TimeSprite in any way.)