Tools for Managing Drupal Projects

At Sereno, we use a range of tools to help us keep on top of Drupal development and to keep our clients actively engaged and aware throughout our projects. I'm not suggesting the following approach is best for everyone - the joy of using Agile is that you should really be tailoring all your processes and tools to meet your particular team size and style of working - but this set of tools certainly works well for us.

Planning

As we don't use waterfall, we don't really need really complex and detailed planning tools. However, we still need milestones, dates, estimates and scoping. We've used a number of tools in the past, including Drupal's own OpenAtrium http://openatrium.com/ (we loved it but some of our clients found it overly complex) and Basecamp https://basecamp.com/ which is really nice for clients but didn't give us the kind of control we wanted.

We currently use ActiveCollab. We host this ourselves so we have total control over the environment. It isn't natively Agile (although it's certainly adaptable to that end) but provides a usable interface for us to communicate with our clients and keep on top of the broad sweep of project phases.

Issue Tracking

Again, we've used a range of tools, including Jira, which is incredibly powerful but which some of our clients found too intimidating. We now use the Bug Genie. This is a fully agile open source environment that does a fantastic job of keeping track on issues. We may even decide to gradually migrate our planning here too.

Kanban

We typically use a range of approaches to Agile development. These have developed to suit our team size and the way we naturally like to work. We always use a whiteboard in conjunction with software. A big board that helps both ourselves and our clients see the backlog, what we're currently working on and what we've done. Simple, elegant and incredibly useful.

Version Control

We used to run everything on our own install of svn but after switching to git about a year ago, we host everything on GitHub. The pricing model works for us and GitHub's integration with developer tools (eg Bug Genie and NetBeans) makes it a perfect choice.