scmple

Tagline - This should be easy. We think it should be simple.

Scmple is my (oops our) new pet-project. What I am referring to as this and it are common problems we all face working as part of a small team on a small project. We, as part of the scmple team, want to help you to iron out these problems. We hope to make it easier for the developers to spend more of their time and effort on developing software and less on (painfully time-consuming but much-needed) administration.

Here is a typical scenario that inspired us to come up with this idea - Person A has an awesome idea, it's going to be The-Next-Big-Thing! Person A codes away at night for a few days and brags about it to Friend B. B is now all fired up and volunteers his supreme comp sci development skills. So A and B work on this new side project (lets call it TNBT). Being developers, they know they have to use a versioning system and pick SVN or CVS or Git and they start coding away. They face a few hassles along the way - who works on what feature, who fixes which bug, is there a trail of all the bug fixes (aside from versioning history), who is tracking the project milestones, what is the future feature set..but they ignore them for the time being since having functional and working code is more important. Friend C also wants to join them. So as a small team, A, B, C have to collaborate on working on TNBT and to make progress, some of the hassles need to be addressed. Keep in mind that the only time they get to work on their dream project is after-work hours and on weekends. Hence the time that they actually spend on working together is very precious. They need to be able to use this time wisely and not in integrating and organizing three to-do lists with 100 bullet points and spreadsheets containing a complex matrix of which person is assigned to which task. What this team needs is a simple, straight-forward solution that offers them project management, task management, work assignments, issue tracking, discussion forums.

Scmple to the rescue. What we hope to achieve here is to simplify the process of product and project management. I know that developers dislike the word management, but to make your product even a tiny bit successful, you need to be able to manage it efficiently. Scmple will provide a hosted platform for versioning, with a built-in feature set like issue tracking, task management, project milestones, discussion and support forum. It's designed to integrate effortlessly with your development enviroment so that writing code and managing a project go hand-in-hand.

Technology - Open Source is the way to go. We decided to use Git as the version control system (read my blog post), Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL, with a lot of AJAX goodies thrown in. We are looking at a variety of solutions and mayyyyyybe mootools is winning.

We are working on getting a beta version out soon. Will keep you guys updated!