Software solutions based on customized packages or custom made applications clog the Corporate IT Landscape. Developing stable IT solutions that can shift alongside business requirements is top priority for today’s IT managers.
What drove me into EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) was the opportunity to continuously learn new technologies. Little I knew at the time that, behind each of those technologies was a team with all of its predicaments.
As a team leader, one of the most challenging issues on leadership is to be assigned an already established team.
Whether the previous team leader has moved on to a higher position or decommissioned, all the expectations and doubts will fall on you. Even if assembling a team from scratch is hard, almost every team leader will choose to do it, instead of ‘inheriting’ a team. When development teams begin to grow there is always the need to add organization on-top of your Source Control Management (SCM) system. Whether a full project management tool or a light weighted solution, this kind of tools improve communication and productivity. The goal is to control software development and the team behind it. Therefore I’m excluding tools like Basecamp, Asana... that focus more on team collaboration. Redmine (http://www.redmine.org/) is perhaps the most popular open source project management application, built on-top of the Ruby on Rails framework that allows it to be cross-platform and cross-database. From the feature list bellow (image extracted from http://www.redmine.org/), the three most valuable features in my opinion are ‘Flexible issue tracking system’, ‘Gantt chart and calendar’ and ‘SCM integration’. This means that teams have the capability of centralizing all the projects together with the source code revisions and handle any issues using tickets. Together it can be read as: Traceability. There are some drawbacks but mostly operational: deploying and configuring Redmine requires expertise like DBA, shellscript and Ruby. Some team leaders don’t like the dependency it introduces in your SCM, almost like a DSL for comments and revisions.
The time I used it I must praise the bitnami guys (https://bitnami.com/) for providing a ready to roll VM already installed with Redmine and MySQL. |
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