Of the two principle web-based project management and bug/issue tracking system (welterweight class) contenders, which is better: Pivotal Tracker, or Trac?
Pivotal Tracker, (or “Pivotal” as the Agile kids call it) has been providing users with a free, lightweight SAAS web application that itself holds to the principles of Agile since nearly the beginning of that movement.
Trac, an open source project released in 2006, delivers a completely integrated and configurable Source Control/Revision Tracking/Project Report Generation/Wiki system.
A brand-new Pivotal Tracker project takes less than a minute to set up. What’s your email? Project name? Other people? A list of tasks? (You can import tasks and users from .csv if you like.) There’s a settings page, so you can set how often you’d like emails and whether or not you can get points for completing chores or not.
A task (story/chore/bug) in Pivotal has a title, point estimate, description, and some comments. It’s roughly about the same information as you could fit on a post-it note. In fact, the whole system works about the same way as post-its on a whiteboard. You can drag and drop tasks to indicate their status, and the UI is clean, responsive, and minimalist.
Pivotal generates some pretty cool reports based on velocity, which is a way of abstracting estimates according to complexity – not according to time, as in PMI-style Project Management. If you don’t like that, tough. It also provides little support for integration with whatever other tools you happen to be using. Maybe some post-commit hooks, or it will Tweet changes, if you want. All in all, though, not much in the way of customization.
Trac installs are large projects of their own – the installation process is well-documented, but the details vary between systems, there are a lot of great plugins (some of which the dev team will claim they must have or else they will not be able to start their IDEs) that have their own dependencies and installations to work out, and there are many high-functioning teams that still don’t have their Trac install set up exactly the way they want it.
But oh, the possibilities! Trac can authenticate with Active Directory, it can generate whatever reports you want, tickets can have 48 required fields if you like, you can export the whole thing into a stack of spreadsheets. It even comes with a wiki by default. Best of all, it’s BFFs with Subversion (Trivia: Trac was originally named SVNTrac!) and it has a thorough SVN repository browser.
That last one, the repository browser, is the killer feature for us. Trac’s SCM tech, which allows you to view changesets, revisions, diffs, and exports, is a genuine silver bullet for finding out ‘OMG WHAT WERE THEY THINKING’ and an indispensable tool for code review.
Pivotal Tracker is a fantastic web 2.0 todo list, which will let you quickly and painlessly get the overhead of ‘who is doing what and when’ parts of a project sorted out. Especially good within small-team collaboration to prevent duplicate work, suggest tasks for each other, and chart velocity. Trac is a kind of customizable juggernaut of features and systems, and isn’t nearly as convenient, but we see it as a necessity because SVN itself isn’t enough to keep track of detailed comments or to show great looking diffs. At MokaSocial, we find both vital to our workflow.
Ultimately, Pivotal wins, if you’re looking for five star software.
Thanks Pivotal Labs! Thanks Edgewall!
