Project Management for Student or Other Projects

Getting a handle on managing your software projects is not trivial, but it doesn't have to be cumbersome.  Some people equate software engineering with paperwork and that is unfortunate as that sells it short.  Some ORGANIZATIONS may stress it and some process MODELS may have more documentation than others, but in my opinion a lot of these same people think there code is self-documenting and either dump their problems into the lap of the next person or they dwell too much on some small technical problem and not the project as a whole.

At any rate, there are a lot of great tools out there and many of them are either free or very low cost.  You need to find the right tool for what you want to do.  Microsoft Project works well for some people but it is not free and many people either do not use it well or try to shoe horn it into their organization since it makes pretty charts.

There are 2 tools that are examples of what you may want to take a look at for your student or other project.  One is Project Dune, which is open source and requires you to configure it to run on your own server.  It has a lot of great general features, as well as those pertinent to Scrum.  Some schools provide the facility for students to run a project on a virtual server and so if enabling the department to host it permanently is not feasible, hosting it on your team's virtual server may be an option.

If maintaining a server is not an option or of interest to you, then ZOHO Project may be.  You don't host it, they do.  And you can access from home or your lab or wherever you work - you just need a browser.  They will host a project for free, which should work for a class.  But if you like it enough, which you may then you can shell out $5-8 per month and be able to host more projects, get more space, etc.  You can share files there, have a forum for your project, maintain a schedule, delegate tasks, etc.  The nice thing about it is that you can work with it the way you want to in that it will email you when something is assigned to you and you can even set up a RSS feed for changes/updates to the project.  These features and the lack of needing to deal with configuring and maintaining a server make it appealing.  

Project Dune may be a long-term solution if you want fine-grained control.  I will be using ZOHO Projects this fall with several projects so I will fill you in.  So far I have been setting up the project shell to demo it for the teams and it is going well - the terminology is general SE so no process-specific jargon.  More to come.