The High Order Bit

I just started full time (well, albeit a few handovers left w/ M&C Saatchi) at a new startup at the cross roads of 3 cultural technology movements (more on that much later). At the moment, after the last PHP meetup in London, I’m contemplating project tracking software once again. I’m setting up our development infrastructure over the next few weeks and with the new project get to revisit the fundamentals of the development environment. Our programmers will be working with HTML/JavaScript/CSS, AS3, and PHP.

This seems to be a constant obsession of mine: in agile teams, how do you best carry and share task information, sync tasks to subversion (yeah, I haven’t jumped on the GIT bandwagon just yet), and allow programmers to seamlessly submit task information (time spent, feedback questions, commit comments, etc).

In the past I’ve had the individual elements of this perfect equation by running a subversion server, Redmine, whatever text editor developers felt comfortable with (TextWrangler, FDT, Eclipse+Subclipse, Dreamweaver, whatever)  – but that usually requires a lot of jumping around to different windows to gather task info (web browser), update svn (editor/standalone svn client), edit code (editor), commit back in (editor/standalone svn client),  and update task information (again, back to a web browser).

Ideally, a programmer could view their task list, open a task as ‘in progress’, commit/update svn, and mark tasks complete all through their editor. That way programmers would have a completely (or close to it) uninterrupted workflow when addressing issues. That’s the quest for the moment, anyway. Suggestions most welcome!