[Chicago] requirements tracking in python

[Pete]

On Thursday January 24 2008 11:32:10 am Chris McAvoy wrote:
> Trac is pretty great.  You can get creative with tickets.  In general
> though, it sounds like your whole crew needs to evaluate your
> development methodologies...figure out what works, and stick with
> it.  That usually requires a bunch of buy in from a bunch of people
> who don't like to buy in, but if you get it all lined up, it might
> make things easier than finding a magical software package that fixes
> everything.

Lemme 2nd trac... we use it for basically everything.  I think we average 
around a 1000 tickets per year.  For a ~5 person company.  Since we don't 
have a physical office, our requirements/design discussions happen on the 
tickets (though we do discuss on IM sometimes & summarize on the ticket).  
It's nice having the entire context of a SVN change is in one place.  Though 
sometimes finding what you're looking for is a little hard, and it's no 
substitute for the high-level overview wiki documentation gives.

Though as Chris mentions, this is kinda getting more into methodology than 
tools.

On that note, do people really work off pre-defined specs?  We find that we 
start out with a rough idea of what we're trying to do and refine the *idea* 
as we implement.  In software, I find it's hard to know what you want until 
you're halfway there.  IMO, that's little-a agile.

Again, it's a culture thing.  Though one of my coworkers used to print out 
circuit diagrams on a large format printer and hang them on the wall for the 
benefit of the managers at his previous job. YMMV.

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