I've been looking for "project management" software (I know, yuck) for some time. Mainly because I want to incorporate bug/issue tracking, discussion boards, and wikis into j0rb (and in personal projects, etc.). Firstly, it's very difficult to keep track of bugs by hand and often you forget about them before you fix them. When it comes to software development there's just too many issues, whether bugs, design decisions, or potential hiccups; to keep track of. I also want some persistent medium to discuss software design with colleagues. At j0rb we currently discuss things either through instant messaging or we talk in person.
The problem with instant messaging is that there's no organization to it. If you forget what was discussed or what conclusions everyone came to then you have to search through chat logs and hope to find it. If you do find it, you have to sort through intertwined discussions to find the relevant material. It's also hard to have meaningful discussions because instant messengers are generally designed to send single sentences or short paragraphs. It's hard to communicate code ideas or complex ideas that require more space to type. The problem with talking in person is that there's no log at all. There's no searching it to refresh your memory, etc.
Open source projects have gotten by with mailing lists for a long time and it seems the most experienced still prefer them to discussion boards. I figured there must be good reason for this so I've personally taken a liking to them. However, I don't think mailing lists would work well at j0rb. It's a Windows-based shop and I generally hate Windows-based mail clients for good reason. I generally use Gmail's Web interface for personal mail, which works quite well for most E-mail needs, but I wouldn't be allowed to discuss company topics through a remotely hosted service. At least, not a free one with no guarantees about security or privacy.
I'd be happy to try mutt from Cygwin against a locally hosted server, but odds are that my colleagues would be sending HTML E-mails and wouldn't understand why that was a problem (nor why I'd choose to use a plain-text client). For these reasons, I don't think a mailing list would work particularly well at j0rb. Colleague incompatibility. :P A discussion board seems to be the next best thing (with the advantage of edits to correct mistakes, etc.).
Wikis are great for keeping track of a growing and dynamic knowledge base of information. I think they'd work well for documenting certain gotchas discovered in languages, APIs, and platforms, etc.; as well as our own software's gotchas.
Anyway, I've recently been reading Joel on Software. There are a lot of really good articles that make a lot of sense. It seems Joel Spolsky is very experienced in project management and the like. The allure of fully defined specifications and feasible schedules got me interested in taking a look at FogBugz, some project management software developed by Joel's company, Fog Creek Software. I generally avoid commercial software, since as a general rule it's garbage, but I am willing to appreciate some commercial offerings (everything from Microsoft not being among them *cough*).
Anyway, it sounded like FogBugz was a pretty complete solution and I had hoped that it was better than what we have now (which can't do any of the things I mentioned above). I suggested it as an option to management, but the price seems kind of steep. Fortunately, they offer the hosted service for free to individuals so I decided to sign up for personal projects so I could get a look at just what it offered. I was pretty disappointed. At least at first glance, the UI seems rather bloated and disorganized. I'm having a hard time trying to figure out where different types of information are organized. It seems all it really tracks are "cases", which can be bugs, issues, or what have you. Then they use "filters" to determine which cases you see, by tons of criteria. This seems to be the way to show cases for a particular project. It seems awkward that way, but maybe that's just because I'm not used to it.
I decided to ask the Interwebz what it thought of FogBugz. I started where I usually start: at Wikipedia. It was there that I discovered, much to my dismay, Thistle and Wasabi.
It seems that FogBugz was originally written in Classic ASP/VBScript. I can sympathize because our main software project is mostly written in the same. What appears like an OK language from the surface is surely not. Visual Basic is bad enough, but VBScript is like a stripped down Visual Basic with half of the features missing or mutilated. Those that have worked with VBScript for any considerable period of time know that it is the decay-er of sanity. It has numerous limitations and has a weak "standard library" and most non-trivial functionality comes from server "components" that do not appear to be native VBScript at all (I've always assumed they were DLLs written in C or C++, but I suppose it's possible that they're actually written in pure evil). VBScript can't do much without these components. You apparently need these components for things like handling file uploads or connecting to databases. Things that other languages, like PHP, Python, and Perl can do "themselves". Probably because those languages are "open".
Apparently, Fog Creek Software wanted FogBugz to run on Linux servers, but ASP/VBScript is (officially) an abomination of IIS and the Windows operating system. I think at this point most would realize their mistake (developing software with ASP in the first place) and work towards correcting it by rewriting the application in a better language (and one that was cross-platform), but it seems that Fog Creek decided instead to develop a "compiler" (converter, or what ever you want to call it) that could convert ASP into PHP so that they could run their application on Linux boxes without having to completely rewrite it.
Now I don't know how many lines of code FogBugz was at the time or how complicated this "compiler", dubbed Thistle, was to write (it's over my head, I know that); but I know that it only took a few days of maintaining an ASP/VBScript application for me to begin begging almost daily to rewrite the application in something more sane. They didn't stop there, however. They apparently realized that VBScript combined with Thistle was too limited in what it could do (light bulb, anyone?). They missed their second opportunity to change platforms and instead wrote another "compiler" that extends VBScript's functionality, adding modern features that probably should have been there in the beginning, and spits out either PHP or .NET. They call this monstrosity Wasabi. All of that trouble to extend evil that never should have existed in the first place. I can't imagine that developing Thistle and Wasabi was faster than just rewriting their application in a cross-platform language, preferably an open one that will be around for a while, and leaving it at that.
Apparently they keep both of these tools internal. So not only did they create such evils, encouraging the persistence of VBScript-ness, but they didn't even release it to the world for them to benefit (free or otherwise). WTF.
I'm somehow less enthusiastic about FogBugz now..
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