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Wow, here’s a new discovery with blogging: I’ve recently discovered the tension that exists between blogging about really important stuff and the time it takes to write such blogs. It’s funny because I want to blog about other stuff, but have these big essays that I’m trying to crank out and don’t want to get too ahead of myself. Sigh. Here’s what’s on the backburner:

* Jen Poley’s photos of Poley Geekfest 2003
* Project Management Methodology, A Comparative Analysis
* Review of theooze’s “Churchless Faith” article

In the meantime, here’s something quick, interesting, and nerdy:

Team DLSI: Project Backlog. I’ve found and set up some bug-tracking software to the project so we can start inputting and assigning discrete tasks. It is available here.

So I was looking around on the web for a system that can facillitate what the SCRUM project management methodology calls a “backlog”—a simple list of prioritized and assigned tasks to be processed over the course of a SCRUM “sprint.” What I wanted was a bug/request management solution for the web. I have built such a system in Microsoft Access, but it’s more for personal use than team use. Bugzilla is a great application, but the forms are extremely confusing at first glance and I feared the install process would be painful. On a whim, I searched the web for “PHP MySQL bug tracking” and found Mantis. Mantis has a very short install process, runs on my platform environment, is stable, and looks great. I couldn’t believe how quick and painless it was.

This would be a great tool for implementing small-time opensource projects like OpenMind.

Ironically, I had actually stumbled across Mantis without even realizing it earlier in the day when I was posting a bug on the Plucker site (see here for more info on that).

Categorized as Geek, kennsarah.net