University Homepage School Homepage School Contacts School Search

SEOC2: Software project management tools

The Tools lecture discusses some crucial tools for use in large software projects, focusing on small open-source tools that can be components of many software development processes. The tools mentioned in the lecture, plus suggestions from the audience, are listed below. Commercial tools are marked with ($$); the rest should be freely available.

There is no way for this list to be comprehensive or up to date, nor do I expect everyone to check out all these tools. However, it would be good to be familiar with at least one tool from each category, and I can't recommend strongly enough being intimately familiar with some tools from the Build control and Revision control categories, e.g. gmake and CVS, and to actually use them in your own projects.

Build control

make/gmake (UNIX-focused; make sure to use GNU version), ant (Java-focused), autoconf/automake (generates makefiles for multiple UNIX-like machines)

Revision control

CVS (handles multiple concurrent developers; TortoiseCVS is a Windows version), Subversion (claims to be better CVS), Arch (claims to be better CVS), VSS ($$), StarTeam ($$), Rational ClearCase ($$), RCS (outdated), SCCS (outdated)

Unit/regression testing

JUnit/ pyunit/ CppUnit/ NUnit (one version per language)

Bug/issue tracking

BugZilla/ IssueZilla, GNATS, Mantis (simpler for users than BugZilla), TestTrack Pro ($$; bug tracking, feature requests)

Documentation generation

Doxygen (handles several languages), JavaDoc/ pydoc/ NDoc/ PHPDoc (one version per language)

Integrated suites

Maven (general project management), Cruise Control (automated build, integration, testing, reports), SourceForge (CVS, bug tracking, issue tracking, file releases, web hosting), Rational Unified Process ($$)

More such tools for Linux are listed at Linas.org, and many more such lists should be available on the web.

Last updated: 2005/02/27 16:33:06