OT: PSP, XP, TDD and other methodologies for solitary programmers

[Peter Hansen]

Donnal Walter wrote:
> 
> "Peter Hansen" <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message
> news:3E1467EE.93860EC4 at engcorp.com...
> > Another very useful one has been to start using
> > an "issue tracker" to track all issues with the
> > project, and to prioritize them aggressively, in
> > order to limit scope creep.
> 
> What tool(s) do you use for issue prioritizing and tracking? I've tried to
> do something similar using just a text file, but it is becoming unwieldy.

We use an inhouse-developed issue tracker based on Zope (a really
crufty bunch of DTML, two years old with only minimal improvements
to date since DTML is so hideous for that kind of thing).  We'd really
really love to rewrite it in Python, but at the moment that's pretty 
far down the priority list.

I would suggest checking out the basic "bug tracker" or similar
tools that are available, pick a clean one, butcher it into something
even simpler than what is provided, and work with that.  Almost any
decent and *simple* bug tracker should be quite adequate for the purpose.
I strongly recommend using a web-based tool for anything like this,
unless you really are never at another location and always work 
completely alone.  Personally, I access my own issue trackers from
several different places and couldn't survive without them now.

(Sometime this year I'm hoping to redo this thing on my own, as a
test-driven open-source development which would be available to
anyone to use.  It would be nice if this could be done in such a
way as to be independent from Zope, Twisted, and any other specific
framework.)

-Peter