New project, new tools
Today development kicks off on 'Rhubarb on Rails' the project to turn our letter writing prototype into production standard code that can be used around the world. It's a short project - estimated at two weeks of development, and it's being carried out on our behalf by Fingertips, who will hopefully be posting about their experiences of the project on this blog.
Since the project is so short we've decided that we'll be working with Fingertips tools of choice. So that's BaseCamp for project management, and Trac for issue tracking and SVN access. (Copies of the work in progress will be moved to our public SVN server on a weekly basis.)
Within Greenpeace we use RT for issue tracking, largely because we've been using it for so long, and have so much stuff in it that moving away would be hugely expensive. By and large we're not that happy with RT, but finding an alternative that does what we want, the way we want it is proving much harder than expected. So trying out the BaseCamp / Trac combination is a good thing to be doing, if nothing else it might stop Ximon from writing a new bug tracker out of sheer frustration...
(I have been threatening to do that for some time, but 'learning to program' needs to come first...)