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Project Estimation / Time Tracking software

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douglasb

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I have been tasked with recommending a software to do estimates and manage time for a small software development company. Mostly we do web development in .Net, but we occasionally do other things as well. We are a small company (< 10 employees).

Can anyone recommend an off-the-shelf software to do this? It will most likely have to be limited to Windows OS (or web-based).
 
MS Project and experience. Project will help manage tasks, dependencies, duration, metric time, overall timeline and milestones.

Individual estimates come with experience. You can set the bar for an "average" time for certain tasks and go from there.
 
We use Redmine, and like it. Free, easy to set up.

We actually run it off a linux VM, but I'm pretty sure you can set it up on Windows.

One area of weakness though is it's analytics. For that we use the API to pull the data into other tools. We will be switching to a homegrown system soon, which has a lot of cool ideas we stole from redmine. We are trying to get all of our agile tools into fewer and fewer systems to avoid app soup. But since we are a .Net shop and Redmine is in PHP (I think, maybe it's ruby?) it didn't make the cut to be integrated.

JIRA might also be worth a look, last I used it it seemd to have quite a bit of charting abilities that cam in handy.
 
It really depends on what software development methodology you use. There are great tools out there for kanban, waterfall, agile, scrum, etc. Once you have the method, then you can find a tool that works best in that method.
 
We are probably somewhere between Waterfall, Scrum, and Lean in terms of methodology. I would say that we lean towards Waterfall, but only because there are a few older guys that are somewhat set in their ways. We are definitely not Kanban, or Agile, although we are starting to release things more frequently than we used to.
 
A corkboard and some cards. Honestly its all you need for planning and estimation these days. Low tech, low cost story point planning produces amazing accuracy over a short time period and all it requires is a bit of knowledge on the psychology of estimation and how to use points.
 
BrightCandle said:
A corkboard and some cards. Honestly its all you need for planning and estimation these days. Low tech, low cost story point planning produces amazing accuracy over a short time period and all it requires is a bit of knowledge on the psychology of estimation and how to use points.
Click to expand...

I don't think this is going to be a sufficient answer for my boss. We already use a whiteboard pretty regularly, but he wants something a little more modern. He also wants a way to track tasks so that he can bill them to the client later.
 
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