Trying Unfuddle

I'm in the market for some project management software. I need something to manage a single dev (me) on small 100-300 hour projects with stories, time tracking, some kind of widget or IDE integration, a simple wiki or cms for sharing notes and svn integration (see my previous article for the detailed requirements.) I'm not sure Unfuddled is exactly what I'm looking for. I don't like the lack of stories (I can only roll up tasks by milestones so I need to treat each story as a milestone which is not really ideal), but it is there, it looks like it should work, and it's quick to get started with. And the corporate version which includes time tracking and unlimited projects is $49/mo, so that's about where I wanted to be financially. Anyhow, I decided to give it a go for this project. Here's my experience . . .

Reading the Reviews
Just before I jumped in, I wanted to see what others thought. I'd noticed Unfuddled mentioned before along with LightHouse and other bug tracking/project management apps, so it seemed to be a reasonable possibility, but I wanted to see if there were any specific reviews. I found the Techcrunch launch announcement and a number of reviews. Bottom line, there seems to be some traction and no obvious show stoppers. Some people point out you could "just use Trac" (or Google code), but for me the integrated time tracking and reporting is key and while I know there are options within Trac, it isn't a good fit for what I want. Also, *I* find Trac's UI unintuitive and I'm a developer. Subjecting clients to it (in my opinion) is (a) cruel and unusual and (b) not in my long term economic interests! So, on with Unfuddled.

Trying Unfuddle
The quickest way to check out a tool is to start using it, so I signed up for an account. SIgnup is a painfree process with just a single screen for free accounts and one more for payment details if you choose a paid account (I chose the $49 a month corporate account as that was the simplest account including time tracking). I was immediately logged into my account and started by creating some milestones (some were stories, some were other collections of tasks that had been estimated such as creating project management infrastructure). Creating the milestones and associated tickets (along with their time estimates) was just as easy as you'd expect from a well designed web 2.0 app.

A biggie for me was minimizing context shifting. My idea would have been a Mylyn style IDE integrated interface, but I downloaded the Unfuddled Mac widget to give it a try. It isn't quite as slick as being within Eclipse, but it seems to work pretty well, with views of milestones and tasks and the ability to enter time tracking right within the widget it actually seems pretty cool.

Next I needed to add the client to the project. I clicked on "people" and was easily able to invite the client to the project - nice and simple. And there are some basic permissions which is nice so I can let the client read my notes and create tickets without having to give them commit access to svn!

I then started playing with the tasks and noticed that when I tried to complete a task I was given the option to add n-time tracked items so I could break a task down into the sub-steps that I actually performed to complete it which was nice, although I'd still like to be able to assign estimates to milestones rather than having to just throw in a task. For instance, I have some stories with client time estimates, but I haven't broken them down into small enough tasks for me to enter an accurate estimate. Immediately that is a little frustrating as I can't get a sense of project scope just yet, but on reflection it may be a good thing. Truth is if I don't have small enough tasks clearly defined, any estimate is just going to be pure guess work, so maybe this is a case of the software just not allowing me to hurt myself with meaningless estimates!

I was also able to easily use Eclipse to set up a project based on a svn export from the new project, and committing a couple of test files made them available through the built in svn browser, so that was nice.

Then I went on to create a couple of wikis (they call them notebooks) for sharing information. They support the ability to attach files, but not to upload and include things like images which is a little annoying as it means that client screen shots will either have to be hosted elsewhere or uploaded into svn and accessed from there (which might not be a bad approach - putting all of the assets into source control). Again, the functionality just worked and seemed acceptable, allowing me to include HTML markup into my docs which was the easiest markup for me as I'm building web projects all the time.

So, in less that two hours I've managed to set up a pretty decent project management system. i'd like the idea of explicit support for stories and I know the reporting is going to come up short because I can't classify the tasks as granularly as I'd like, but with the integrated time tracking and the nice, usable interface it is definitely a big step up from Trac for my use case. I'll post another article when I wrap the project towards the end of January with my thoughts after using the software for an entire project.

Some more notes after a little more playing:

• You can upload binary files like jpg's into the svn repo, but you can't view them online, so while I can use this for storing wireframe images, I can't use it to host them. That is annoying as I can upload images to the Wiki but cant include them inline unless I host them elsewhere, so with no general "bucket" for uploading such image files I'm going to have to host that on another server which seems a little silly.
• Because this isn't an occasionally connected AIR app, if unfuddled does decide to go down, I'm going to be having a really unproductive day. No problems to date, but I really think things like project management and time tracking are a great use case for occasionally connected AIR apps.

Will keep you posted with impressions!