Project Management with Bugzilla, CVS and Mailing lists

Presenter: Philip Tellis

Description: Project management is more about managing collaboration between developers and tracking completeness of features than actually writing code. Issue tracking and version control aid in project management but unless these tools integrate with each other, one can get lost in tracking hell.

There have been a few cases where a project manager has had to match timestamps across tools. Making sure all features are well documented is also a project manager's responsibility, and many times, informal communication between developers serves as better developer documentation than anything else stating the "why" rather than the "what" behind a feature.

These communication tools should also be integrated into the process. Integration between these tools isn't a hard job, and once set up, the whole process runs smoothly without human intervention. The project manager can then concentrate on getting a release out and, as it is in most open source projects, get down and write some code.

This talk picks Bugzilla, CVS, and mailing lists as the three tools for collaborative development, and shows how to integrate them to work together. Other collaborative tools like IRC and Wikis will be touched upon, but not detailed.