I've recently returned to freelancing after working for most of the past year at
Myplanet, a relatively large web development company that uses Agile techniques to manage teamwork on complex projects. The experience left me impressed with how effective good project management systems and tools can be. Back on my own again, I set off in search of some kind of tool that would let me manage my work. Ideally it would operate both as a bug tracker and as a sprint/scheduling tool, be open source, and written in PHP.
My criteria -- and, it turns out, my experiences -- are very much like Sheri Wheeler's, as she recounts in her blog posts:
My investigation was largely consistent with her findings. Most of the tools I tried were out of date, buggy and frustrating, too complex, or plain old ugly. Which was a little demoralizing.
But along the way I came across
TinyIssue, which is a very nicely designed, extremely simple bug tracker. At first I discounted it as a suitable candidate because out of the box it didn't offer me the sprint/scheduling tools I was after. My recent experience using Agile and
JIRA demonstrated the effectiveness of kanban-style boards for keeping organized and informed about the state of my work. I didn't need something as heavyweight as most Agile / Scrum / Kanban tools, however.
Having failed to find anything better, and because I was impressed with its design and usability, I took a peek under the hood of TinyIssue. I learned that it's built on a PHP framework called
Laravel, which -- in true open source fashion -- opened the door for me to learn some new things and to create the tools I wanted. And that's
exactly what I did. It turns out Laravel is quite easy to learn, and TinyIssue is very easy to extend.
I now run a customized version of TinyIssue (
available from my GitHub) that adds a personal kanban board and drag-and-drop issue weighting to its elegant bug tracker functions. Please check it out if you're looking for something that does a couple of things (issue tracking and organizing) simply and well. And of course you can always take it in new and interesting directions yourself. Pull requests are welcome.
