assembla (on the competitive horizon)

[Christopher Johnson]

Hi folks,

Here is a free agile hosted teamspace offering I stumbled across: http://www.assembla.com/

Thought it would be important to check out. I just found and haven't really investigated yet...

Cheers,
Chris

--
Cofounder and CEO
ifPeople - Innovation for People
www.ifpeople.net
t: 678-608-3408

We're currently looking for a Project Manager to join out team! Check out ifpeople.net for more.

[Shimon Rura]

I've used assembla a lot over the past few years, mostly as an easy
way to get a free subversion repository. They provide a bunch of
different services designed to support distributed software teams,
including the basics like svn, trac, wiki, and chat, as well as custom
services (which I've not used) like talent search and custom
development services.

Their approach is to integrate tools like Trac and use a single
login/password to access all the different components. So when you
create an assembla "Team Space", you know each person in the members
list can edit the wiki and checkout from svn using the same password.

It even has a time-tracking function to support hourly billing, but I
haven't quite figured out how that works.

One tradeoff is that Assembla is fairly generic -- it gives you a
bunch of basic tools, and they run reliably, but probably aren't going
to specifically support your development process or match your company
colors and fonts. Another may be that it's a hosted solution -- not
something you can easily hack additional features on to.

shimon.