Company wants to write custom project management tool, rather then use third party product.
- by Jason Evans
At the company I work, we are really wanting to get into the agile methodology for developing software. One thing that I'm not excited about is the fact that management wants us to build a custom project management feature inside the company's Intranet.
I think this is a total waste of time. There are many great third party tools available (e.g. Axosoft OnTime) that can do everything we need, and more. For how much development time it would cost us to build our own project management module, we could buy numerous licences for a third party product.
One concern is that, whilst we are writing code for a client, and using our custom Intranet project management module, we find bugs in the module that need fixing ASAP. That means having to stop work on the client code to fix the Intranet. That just puts shivers down my spine.
Another worry I have is lack of functionality. This custom module is going to be so basic, that it will just feel really crap to use. That might sound a bit snooty, but for goodness sake, many third party tools are so feature rich, that the idea of having to write our own tool makes feel very uneasy. In fact, I can't be bothered.
What do you guys think?
I'm going to raise this issue with my boss, since I feel it's such an important topic to talk about.
EDIT:
Thanks for the great responses, much appreciated. To summarize some of them:
Money
Naturally my boss does want to save money, by not forking out a few hundred £'s for licences. However, for us to write a custom tool, it will take x number of days, multiplied by approx £500, which is our costs. I don't see the business value in this.
Management have mentioned that they want to sell the Intranet as a product in the future, but it's so custom to our needs (and downright basic), that in order to give it to another client, I can see us having to fork a version of the code and rebuild the majority of it anyway. So it's not like we're gaining anything there in reuse.
Features
Having our own custom module means not feature bloat - only the functionality we require will be in the product. My issue is that there are plenty of free, open-source project management tools out there with minimal features already. So even if cost is an issue, we could look into open-source. Again it all boils down to the fact that I don't see the point in writing a project management tool in this day and age. It's a bit like writing your own web browser - why?, what's the point?
Although management are asking for this tool, just because they are, it does not mean I'm going to please them and do it just because they asked for it. If something does not make sense, then I will raise it as a concern.
At the end of the day, it's the developers who write the code, it's the developers who make money for a business. Thus, as far I'm concerned, the devs have a very big role in deciding how a company should manage projects and what tools are used. "I am Spartan, argh!" :)
Hmm, I've not been able to make this question a wiki for some reason, thus I'm going to have to pick an answer to accept.
Cheers.
Jas.
