Tools for Teams: A Survey of Web-Based Software Project Portals

Greg Wilson and I have spent some time studying web-based project management portals and interviewing their creators to learn more about their features, the needs they try to satisfy and their likey evolution.

We believe the results of our work can be of interest to many of you and have decided to make them freely available on the web. You can find the full article here . Check also Greg’s post about the study . We would welcome your comments here OR ON Greg’s site (we’ll do our best TO replicate the comments).

For those OF you WITH litte patience, the most noteworthy results OF our survey ARE “the fact that the creators of tools meant to support agile processes do not strictly adhere to those practices themselves, but instead trust their developers to use good practices when and as their own best judgment dictates, and the general lack of support for non-code-centric activities such as requirements management, modeling, user experience design, and test management. Both observations raise questions about the focus and direction of much current software engineering research. In particular, we now wonder about the real importance of requirements elicitation and structured development process in the success of a development project (at least when all team members can be classified as expert software engineers).”