Keeping track of tasks, things to do on a programming project

[jroad]

Hi,

Whether as a hobbyist or professional developer, I was curious about some tools & methods people use to keep track of tasks for a project.  I have used a text file in the past for small projects, creating labels like:

[Select]

***********************
Things to Do
***********************
ADD ....
FIX .....
TEST ....
....

*****************
Finished tasks
*****************
....
etc.

As well as categories for design considerations, bugs, etc.

I have been experimenting with FreeMind (http://freemind.sour.../index.php/Main_Page) for organizing functional design thoughts and so far I am liking it.  For a to-do list application catered towards developers, I came across this the other day: http://www.abstracts...m/tdl_resources.html but have not done any testing on it so far.

[Rover]

My favorite tool for such things is Mantis Bug/Issue Tracking software.

Mouser uses it here to track of stuff. 

It may seem like overkill for moderate use, but things seem to grow as time goes by and once you have 6 or 7 (or more) applications to keep track of, it's nice to have alreay been using the right tool for the job.

[mouser]

well things like bugzilla and mantis are good if you have a big multiuser project.. but for single developer todo list, i would rather have a nice local tool.  that abstractspoon one jroad posted looks nice, going to give it a try.

[jroad]

I had a look at Mantis recently and it looked pretty good and setup seemed rather painless.  Going up to the level of bugzilla there is also trac:  http://www.edgewall.com/trac/

[PhilKC]

In eclipse I just use

//TODO
//FIXME
//NOTE
and
//WTF

Which automatically adds a task with a priority. (TODO == normal, FIXME == high, NOTE == low and WTF == high)

For VS2005 I end up using a comment block at the top of the class/function in question.

PhilKC

[app103]

I have been using my ToDoList program for it.


http://appsapps.info/todolist.php

It keeps an alphabetical list of ToDo tasks on the left, stored in one text file...and an alphabetical Done list on the right, stored in another text file.

Load the ToDo list file and it loads both. I keep the files in the same folder with the program source.

I also use this for creating my grocery shopping list. 

[momonan]

Great little program, app103.  I checked out your website, and love that, too.   Inspirational information about your programming learning experiences -- not to mention some fun programming-related links.  I look forward to hearing more.  http://www.appsapps.info/

[f0dder]

I've played a bit with http://www.codeproje.../tools/ToDoList2.asp , which seems pretty decent for single-user projects. I haven't committed myself to any tool yet, although I know I should

(that's the AbstractSpoon thing, by the way, I just happened to learn about it on CodeProject so that's the link I'm putting)