Re-Inventing the Wheel

While writing a take home final for my Software Engineering class I was required to review a variety of project management software and become familiar with one that that would suit the needs of our case study. At first I started looking at the free; open source; web based ones as they are the solutions that would naturally appeal to a student and web developer.

I ended up using a trial version of a proprietary (closed source, usually not free) system to use in my case study and it had some nice features. On my way to the university I was considering the systems I had looked at and was able to generalize that the open source systems were too general to keep me happy, this is most likely because entire communities are contributing what they look for in a project management tool (PMT) and so we see every aspect. Although some of the paid systems may have the exact feature set I wanted, the inability to integrate it with my server its self really turns me off them.

Although I’m generally very against re-inventing the wheel I’m going to go for it just because it’ll be a fun project. I have a few unique situations I want to keep track of with my system such as which server the project is being stored on and logins for remote servers. Because this is sensitive information I’ll want to have some sort of field that is encrypted on the server to store all of this info in case I’m working away from home.

Once I get the basics in there I’ll start adding some of the fancier stuff and making it interact with the websites themselves. I was planning on the server checking for response times on certain pages and flagging the project if the responses aren’t fast enough. Little things like that would save me downtime if I don’t get a chance to make my rounds every week.