4.4. Summary

In this chapter, we discussed lightweight tools for setting up and driving an Agile ALM process: JIRA, FishEye, and Bamboo are lightweight, commercial tools for planning and tracking tasks. Adding Mylyn to this chain makes it possible for developers to manage a task from their workspaces. GreenHopper is a JIRA extension that adds more visualization features, such as cards.

Trac also offers features for planning and tracking tasks. It’s an open source tool that provides a central view on your development activities across development phases. Besides the wiki, it contains release management functionality, including timeline and roadmap features, a ticketing system, and a Subversion repository browser. Trac can be integrated with Mylyn and Hudson/Jenkins. Both Trac and JIRA are highly configurable, feature-rich tools. They can be integrated with other tools, they can aggregate information, and they can serve as one-stop shops for managing your activities by managing tasks. In both toolchains, task-based development is based on the convention of using the ticket number in the check-in comment.