Project analysis with Unfuddle

So you are working on a project or running a project, and you need to keep tabs on progress. You have your project plans and timesheets and whatnot, and all of that is very important, but where do you look to see progress day to day? Well, over the past year I’ve been working with hosted Subversion solutions, and this time around I’m running a project using Unfuddle. It has all of the same features I’m used to, such as ease of setup and user management, but the reporting and messaging is far better than I’ve seen in other solutions.

For me the answer to any question of reporting and analytics is tied to the more gritty data, the stuff that you either ignore or don’t know about or dismiss. Really, though, by keeping things simple you can keep your projects from going off the rails. Have your developers commit code and write documentation (via the Notebook feature … very wiki like) and work tickets. Use the Unfuddle dashboard, or install the Mac desktop widget. Check your email to watch for notifications that come through on activity. The team is either working on code and checking it in or not, and they are either writing documentation or they are not.

And best of all, this communication goes on in a community space, by project, where you can put controls in place to make assignments or review progress and have a centralized audit trail. So, today I give props to Unfuddle. Nice work!