Saturday, December 15, 2007

Developer Project Management Services Growing Increasingly Sophisticated

Two popular project management tools for software developers, Assembla and Unfuddle, both made major releases of new services this week. Unfuddle announced an extensive API yesterday, as well as a Mac Dashboard Widget based on that API. The widget will let users monitor project activity, create tickets, time entries and more from their desktop.

Assembla, a developers' project management service that reports 30k registered users, has announced that it will release a new premium subscription service that includes recruiting and staffing, portfolio management and 2 hours per month of consulting time. The first 30 days of the premium service are free. The company offers an extensive free service already and has put up a page comparing its offerings to competitors.

That page alone is a good read - while some competitors are described in warm and generous terms, that's not always the case. oDesk, for example, is described as a primitive, intrusive and nasty piece of spyware. (I'll add creepy to that list, myself.) Assembla says it regularly sees oDesk customers do their software dev management using Assembla instead.

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