OnTime
In essence this is just a link to Axosoft to take advantage of a promotion to get a second free license of their Bug Tracking Software. Around three years ago we started on developing a specialized financial application. At the time we actually considered purchasing the OnTime product but instead decided to go with the “agile” approach and just use a basic spreadsheet i.e. no more than what was needed given there was only a single developer and a support engineer involved.
The spreadsheet worked fine and has been used for a number of development projects, but seeing the review by Scott Hansellman triggered the thought processes. I’m in the process of reviewing the company workflows and having a hierarchical breakdown of defects, features and tasks with some canned reports would certainly be a step up from a spreadsheet. It would save some workflow time, but more importantly I need a way of easily getting a sense of “the state of the nation” with respect to any single development project or sub-set of it. The free license approach is useful in that I can give the product a go and if it works well, purchase additional licenses as the company expands. If it doesn’t work well then it’s no big deal.
I did consider using the defect tracking features of Visual Studio 2005 Team System and will investigate that in more depth later this year after the Whidbey release. The impression given by various blogs and the MSDN website is that it’s a more heavy weight approach to set up and then there’s the whole pricing thing. A big chunk of change is needed to get access to Team Edition functionality for each developer. Its unclear at this stage whether its better to go the whole hog with Team Edition or use the lower end VS.Net versions and augment it with third party products such as OnTime. The plan is to use the OnTime SDK to read the defect/feature/task data and export it to another format if there is a need to change the bug tracking software in the future.