Working as freelancer you really learn to love that kind of project tracking. Even if they are called bug tracking, issue tracking, user stories, and others, they keep a well organized structure on all requirements. Mainly a centralized way to keep everything organized, even if they are changes, new features, and almost any kind of requirements. Due to its basic structure with a title, a description and comments, with some additional fields — and sometimes very important ones — like dates and time spent, you keep real control on what is being done on a project, allowing to set goals for each sprint, milestone and even the entire project if you want.
Currently I am working on a project where we have everything integrated: issue tracking, code reviews tools, continuous integration, an online documentation tool and time tracking. Everything thanks to the Atlassian suite, and its heavy integration in the development process. There are not word processor documents sent by email or even stored anywhere, everything is specified on the Confluence documentation or wiki tool, everything is centralized, you do not need to search for documents. Each topic on the Confluence wiki is linked to their tasks on the issue tracking software called Jira, where you keep an original estimate, story points — a limit measurement about the team speed — and the currently spent time trying to solve the issue or requirement, also everything is commented once each issue is solved and we can keep real good communications on every issue that is being solved. And Jira is integrated with FishEye, so each commit to Git is linked on the issue Jira, you can see the Git comment and the link to FishEye to make the proper code review, on FishEye you can comment all commits and developers are notified if there is any comment on the committed source. Also, Bamboo is integrated with the complete suite, which is a Continuous Integration tool, so each commit to the test branch is build by Bamboo, which runs the test suites, static analyzers and software metrics tools over the code, allowing our project to be clean from common bugs.
With the scenario above, just imagine how is controlled the project. We have real control on what is being done, what is complete and how measure future changes — because we match the team speed using the proper story point scale with the required time for each story or issue. You do not need to worry about the time spent searching requirements, everything is centralized, so you do not spend any time searching for nothing, you do not waste your time, everything is handy as you can imagine. I think that suites like Atlassian and similar ones are really a very good investment, one of the most important ones that you can do, because they are almost the best approach to project management through software that you can do. Even if your team works remotely, you can keep real updates on the source tree and how the project is going.
I really love this tight control on the project. Mainly because I am a very good programmer and usually the Scrum Masters and Product Owners that work with me are really appreciating the amount of code that is being developed and the quality that I bring to the project. I am not afraid of that kind of control, I really like it. So, I do not need nobody does pressure on me, they really know that I am working hard and efficiently. That is why I am happy with this project.
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