on the way for ITM « outboundz

26Mar/100

on the way for ITM

Today I've decided to turn head up & look for better ITM (issue task management) system. And because after going into various examples and TRAC and Mantis and etc. and etc. I found myself in nowhere.

So as been curios what is going on with the head line of development turned to Github & Google Code . Sadly didn't found anything covering my expectations (the same situation as DAssistA though). And while still been curious how other people handle working together in easy enough convenient way decided to give a try to the history:

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. It is sometimes conflated with program management, however technically a program is actually a higher level construct: a group of related and somehow interdependent projects.

And while quick-cross-referencing the information there I stumbled upon the Extreme Programming which in that light is simply told as:

Extreme Programming (XP) is a software development methodology which is intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements.

Interesting thought we use "agile methodologies" all the time, even in a more huge time-laps like in "Phased" methodology used a couple years ago. Or as it is now - everyone looking forward after XP and its frameworks (Scrum). One thing which made me not believing in those methodologies as immediate future for project _development_ is my everyday work using them. Also looking towards the incoming era of open cloud - source it is fairly reasonable to see that those tools & methodologies need more... But what?

And then moved to the next one PRINCE2 - methodology having only one year live. Well I'll leave it without comment... But this (which is older than me) grabbed my imagination - PERT.
PERT is not a methodology as the above mentioned onces, nor it is something new - but all in all it is what every single project been developed nowadays is:

commonly abbreviated PERT, is a model for project management designed to analyze and represent the tasks involved in completing a given project.

So once the project has its tasks, team, goals & all other pre-requirements it can start. And then things get sometimes very ugly - complex tasks relationships, human errors causing reoccurring tasks to became issues and a lot more of the same manner as you may be experienced once in awhile been involved in project development. Naturally projects & their management accordingly their development will evolve, so I questioned myself - "how?".

Took me a while to dig all those, but anyway they all have a same thing and miss another.

So how should look like Issue/Task Management System for projects (not programs) in the future? What should be its features, requirements & _purpose_? Will it help people to communicate more easily over complex inter-related work to be done?

All those questions are still open to me. But one is for sure -> the picture should change...
Mine proposal is to visualize those as graph I'm totally against tables & lists (after all the UI will change as the input goes multi-touch isn't it?).