Some months ago, the Mozilla QA Desktop Automation team started using Pivotal Tracker to manage the mozmill-tests project. We had a broad vision that this would improve the project management, make it more visible to the public, and enable us to grow the project. Over this time we have been largely ineffective in delivering on this goal. Our use of Pivotal has become little more than a Bugzilla clone and is actually counter-productive.
As the project exists today, we use several tools for project management:
- MediaWiki for contributor-oriented project documentation
- Bugzilla to track current development work, whiteboard tags for “bucketing”
- Google Spreadsheet to track coverage and correlation to the manual test repository, Litmus
- Pivotal to track current development work
Let me be clear in saying I still believe Pivotal is a useful tool. I just do not see it as being appropriate for mozmill-tests development at this time. Incorporating a new tool into a project should make our lives easier and ultimately allow us to accelerate progress; using Pivotal has not helped and may have even hindered us in this regard.
Going forward, the project will remain in Pivotal as it exists today; we will simply stop updating it. We believe this will free up some of the busy work so that we can focus more on getting things done and growing the project. We will continue to evaluate our needs and keep an open mind in terms of how best to manage the project.