Menlo’s advice and workshop really helped us to imagine new and effective ways to handle the development process.  We took what they shared and made it work for us with the resources at our disposal.  The greatest thing about their approach is that it is simple, “for humans,” and values a very high number of product iterations focusing on involving the client/user as much as possible (“guerilla” user testing, usability studies, product reviews, etc.).  We were able to come up with a plan for having user tests on prototypes every couple of days which has made designing our applications better and tougher at the same time.  Better because we have far more real user data to work with.  Tougher because sometimes that data is conflicting – some users want one thing, others want the complete opposite.  Balancing these needs with technical limitations adds an additional layer of challenges.  In the end, the greater the challenges, the greater our product will be when we meet them.

We tried installing Trac with Subversion on Hung’s Dreamhost hosting plan, but ran into troubles.  Subversion is a one-click install on Dreamhost and there is a user-contributed script to “easy-install” Trac, but they didn’t seem to work as well with each other as we had hoped.  After toying around with it for some time to no avail, I hit up Google for “free trac subversion hosting” and found Assembla.

Assembla is great.  500 MB of space for Trac integrated with Subversion for free at the click of a button.  There are additional tools for persistent chat, milestone management (although Trac also does this), uploading and viewing large format images, time tracking and more.  The site seems a little buggy here and there (i.e. it is still asking me to verify my email address even though I have already done so; initially tickets in Trac did not work because a separate Tickets manager was enabled in Assembla – not sure why they are duplicating tools), but we resolved that and Trac is working just fine.

We just started using Assembla today, so we’ll see how things go.  I’ll be sure to post any major updates on how using Assembla works out over the course of the summer.