Tools for Teams: A Survey of Web-Based Software Project Portals

Despite their widespread use, software project portals have been studied much less than individual-oriented tools such as integrated development environments (IDEs) [IEEESoftware08]. To begin to rectify this, in July--September 2008 we examined the features of several representative portals and interviewed their developers. Our research goals were to determine what needs those tools were intended to serve, how their feature sets had been chosen (e.g, how their developers had translated perceived needs into functionality) and how they were likely to evolve. To our knowledge, this is the first general study of web-based software project management tools, though their importance was pointed out in [Alshawi03; for comparisons of pre-web tools see [Terry98].