Collaborative Development

In these times of scattered development teams that work in medium to very large projects all over the world, there’s a major need for a tool that helps to manage the collaborative development. This is what's going on for most open source project teams and with companies with geographically distributed teams. The tool I’m introducing today is GForge AS (http://gforgegroup.com). Back at the university, we used GForge open source version ( http://gforge.org ) to host many internal projects. Then I looked at GForge AS from GForge Group (http://gforgegroup.com ) when I joined my current company in Argentina. They have the older open source version and two newer versions, the free Express Edition and the full Advanced Server.

This is an enterprise-grade collaborative development management software, brought by the same people that created SourceForge and GForge open source. I'd like to point out some features we like and helped alot on our daily work: Tracker/Code Integration Provides a powerful tracker with Subversion/CVS integration. It does all that the basics, but also offers some advanced features that, in my case, have found very useful: you can define rules on when commits can be made, or define re-assignments or changes when commits are made, etc. Workflow builder Workflow features let you change or reassign tracker items when source code commits are made, and have these changes cascade to other workflow rules that can, in turn change other fields or reassign the item again. Eclipse, MS project and Visual Studio plugins Those who work with Eclipse or VS will benefit with the plugins. You can do a lot of the usual management stuff without leaving your environment.

Permission Management There's an easy interface for the project administrator to set up roles and who is assigned those roles in the project. Each role can have unique permissions in individual trackers, forums, source code trees, etc. If you are serious about programming in you run or are part of a tem, you should definitely try a collaborative development platform. There are many out there, the one I’m introducing today is widely used all over the world and will ease you everyday work. You can freely download a VM and start hosting your projects right away.