Up until recently I’ve been using ToDoList (read my previous post about it) to keep track of all tasks that needs to be done for the Trekwar project.
Don’t get me wrong, ToDoList is very nice, except there are a few drawbacks that made me go look for a replacement.
- It’s Windows only, so using it from linux would be cumbersome
- It’s not online, so I have to sync the file between different computers
- It’s hard to share the list, or make it public (there is html report, but the output is not very nice, and you’ll have to generate the file + upload it) which is a hassle.
- It’s hard to use this to get a good view of what is needed for a specific release (like to view every task that is needed for alpha, beta or release)
JIRA
I’ve used JIRA a bit at my real job, and it’s pretty good. It’s online, and I installed it on my server to give it a try. I quickly had to abandon that idea seeing that JIRA is extremely bloated.. It uses like 600 MB of ram just starting up, no idea what it uses the memory for, it’s not doing anything remotely fancy that would require that amount of memory.
So I decided to run it from my desktop computer, now I get the same problems as with ToDoList with having to sync files between computers, and difficulty making the task list public. Also the interface itself is pretty bloated and slow, even tough it has pretty nice views for planning and when doing the tasks.
Toodledo
In trying once more to find the perfect tool for managing the tasks of my scrum like development, I tried out Toodledo. I found out about it because minecraft (awesome game BTW) also uses Toodledo as a public task list. Which is good as it lets people following projects get a sense of how much work/time is needed until the next milestone.
Toodledo is a online to do list, and it works very nicely for scrum development. It’s quick and easy without all the bloat of JIRA and gives you pretty much the same information.
It’s very easy to add tasks (subtasks require a pro account which is 15$ per year, well worth the money), and you can create context’s like “alpha”, “beta”, “release”, etc.. and add folders/tags which can be anything. There are lots of different views, I mostly use the main view which has all the tasks grouped by context and sorted by priority. There is also a view for seeing all the tasks in a particular context (like alpha) and the estimated time for all the tasks. (currently 94 hours of work needed before Trekwar can go into alpha).
My only problem with Toodledo is that subtasks don’t show up in the public view, but it should be implemented shortly. Another great thing about Toodledo is the forum, which is frequently visited by the staff/developers.
So if you’re looking for a good way to organize your project, I can definitely recommend Toodledo, and you can try it for free at their website.
For an example you can look at the Trekwar Todo list
