Trac is an open source enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalist approach to web-based software project management. It provides an interface to version control systems (Subversion, Git, Mercurial, …), an integrated Wiki and convenient reporting facilities. As many open source project, Trac has a plugin architecture that allows to extend the core functionalities. Here is a list of Scrum and Agile oriented plugins available in the Trac ecosystem.

As Agile and Scrum are adopted by an increasing number of companies, this book from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde provides important thinking tools to remind us that it is more important to “be agile” than to “do agile”. Scrum or Lean are frameworks that we can use for continuous improvement of our software development process and not tools that should be applied blindly like cooking recipes.

Redmine is a popular open source project management web application. It was written using the Ruby on Rails framework. This software is more oriented towards a traditional approach for project management with Gantt charts and calendar. Redmine architecture allows however creating plugins to add additional features. The development of a number of Agile and Lean plugins has therefore been started in these past years. However not all those plugins have been in continuous development until the current release of Redmine 1.2.1.

This article presents the changes needed to create collaborative agile teams. It explains that you need to modify in your traditional project management team both the process, the way people get work done, and how people work together.

This book is a little bit different in the project management category. Its goal is to present an open framework and not a prescriptive model. Many project managers prefer to apply existing recipes for their project, but if you are ready to step out of your comfort zone, you will find in this books many ingredients to create your own recipe to manage software development projects.