Tracking feature requests for small-scale components
- by DXM
I'm curious how other development teams (especially those that work in moderate to large development groups) track "future" features/wishlists for functionality for internally developed frameworks or components.
I know the standard advice is that a development team should find one good tool for tracking bugs/features and use that for everything and I agree with that if the future requests are for the product itself.
In my company we have an engineering department, which is broken up into multiple groups and within each there can be one to several agile teams. The bug tracking product we use has been "a leader since 1997" (their UI/usability seems to also be evaluated against that year even today) but my agile team or even group doesn't really control what is being used by the whole department.
What we are looking to track is not necessarily product features but expansion/nice to have functionality for internal components that go into our product. So to name a few for example...
framework/utility library on top of CppUnit which our developers share
low-level IPC communications framework
Common development SDK that myself and several other team leads started to help share some common code/tools at the department-wide level (this SDK is released as internal "product" to each of the groups).
Is the standard practice to use the one bug tracking tool? Or would it make more sense to setup something more localized specifically for our needs and maintain it ourselves? It's also unclear how management will feel if developers start performing "IT" roles of maintaining software and servers.
At the same time, right now, we use excel files, internal wiki and MS OneNote for this kind of stuff and that just doesn't feel right.
(I'm afraid to ask for actual software recommendations, since that might make this question more localized or something. Also developers needs this way more than management, so it would be nice to find something either free or no more than the cost of a happy hour).
