Access to Our Internal Bug Tracking and Project Management Software is Now Public

Hi everyone. It's been a long time coming but today I'm happy to announce that our bug tracking and agile project management software, codenamed Track (powered by Jira and Greenhopper from fellow Aussies, Atlassian) is now live at http://track.interspire.com and is accessible for browsing by anyone.

We've been using Track internally for the last few months to aid in our switch from an adhoc to agile development methodology and so far things have gone well. We're not all the way there yet, but we've made excellent progress on:

• Daily stand ups for each development team
• Improved project planning and estimates
• Closer communication between development and support teams
• Tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) including time, opened VS closed bugs, etc
• Visibility into stories from team members outside of development
• Assignment and resolution of critical bugs in a timely manner
• Automated generation of changelogs

Up until earlier this year we were developing based on a more adhoc approach, and while this worked OK to a point, it was hard to scale beyond having a handful of developers on each product.

As our engineering teams have continued to grow (especially the Interspire Shopping Cart/BigCommerce development team), we felt moving towards the agile methodology was the best way to maintain our release schedule as well as per-person accountability in a larger team.

At the moment the Interspire Shopping Cart/BigCommerce and Interspire Email Marketer teams are using the agile methodology and as such they're the main projects represented and visible in Track. We also maintain projects for our internal cross-project libraries such as our template and database libraries and also our Interspire.com website, however these projects are more for reference purposes only.

For now access to Track is read only - bugs should still be submitted through the client area so our support team can verify them and then log the steps for our engineers to replicate them. We may consider opening up Track for public bug submissions early next year.

Opening up Track is part of our ongoing strategy to increase transparency with clients and partners. Simply by visiting Track you can see the status of upcoming releases and even features you've requested. You can see time logged per developer, bugs resolved and assigned to be fixed, release dates and more.

We're in the process of moving our roadmap into Track as well, so keep an eye out for that over the coming weeks. Go ahead and visit http://track.interspire.com if you'd like to see how upcoming releases are progressing, specifically for Interspire Email Marketer 6.0 and Interspire Shopping Cart 5.1.

Any questions or comments are welcome - just leave me a comment below.