Using Trac for agile project management
By now I’ve been using Trac more than two years for managing various projects – from very small ones with just a few people involved (combining in themselves developers, testers and product owners) to large ones with more than 20 people (both in private projects and in Nokia – yes, yes, some Nokia projects are also using Trac).
In agile projects, especially in large organizations, one needs to find the right balance between “post-it management” bordering with chaos and monstrous tools and processes for requirements and defect management and project documentation and reporting. Choosing the right tool can have a significant impact on team performance.
There are multiple commercial tools available for project tracking in agile environment, but I still choose Trac in most of the cases for its openness, simplicity and customizability. Below I explain the reasons for this choice and highlight limitations we faced in large scale projects.