Java Power Tools

Chapter 28. Trac—Lightweight Project Management

An Introduction to Trac

Trac^[27] is a lightweight, open source issue tracking and project management tool that builds on Subversion (Chapter 4) by adding flexible web-based issue tracking, wiki, and reporting functionalities. Its second-to-none integration with Subversion makes it an excellent choice for development teams who use Subversion. It imposes no particular methodology, and so allows a great deal of flexibility in the way it is used. Although it does not provide as wide a range of features as products like Bugzilla, Trac is steadily gaining popularity in the Subversion community. Indeed, many commercial Subversion hosting companies now offer Trac as part of their package deals.

Trac provides a number of interesting features that make it a tool particularly well suited to small teams using lightweight, agile development processes. These include:

• A lightweight issue-tracking system, where issues can be entered and assigned to team members with a minimum of formality and effort

• An excellent web interface to your Subversion source code repository, allowing you to browse your source code and revisions, and keep tabs, via both the web site and RSS feeds, on what changes are happening in the repository

• A wiki-based project management tool, in which you can manage project milestones and iterations, assign tasks, and share documentation and ideas

But one of the nicest things about Trac is the way all of these features are integrated together. ...