Basecamp's biggest missing features for managing software development and collaboration

Question

What features can our team find if we adopt Basecamp for bug tracking, task tracking, external documentation, collaboration, and project management?

I used the free version before and I think 37Signals are great products, but I wanted to hear from you what could be the flaws.

Answer 1

I’ve been using BaseCamp for 2 years now and I think this is a great general project information portal. The ability to store documents, tasks and milestones with a live project is quite impressive.

Unfortunately, their “stay simple” mantra also has many drawbacks regarding the possibilities:

• the calendar is practically unsuitable for anything other than the most basic tasks related to milestones ... to track our development team, we actually collected a custom implementation of Google Calendar and used it for all developers and their tasks.
• BaseCamp is pretty tricky to use to track errors after you get a fair number assigned to different people — the ability to sort is missing (except that you just turn on people) —you will be much happier with full bug tracking, like FogBugz.
• For general project management, Base Camp is great, but we also found that we have external documents where we store all the “real” information - mostly multi-page specifications and just upload them to the base camp every once in a while.

Answer 2

The last time I evaluated Basecamp, I found that one of the missing features is the ability to view workload or other information on several projects. For exmaple, if I wanted to find out if the X developer has too many things to do or was too subtle in several projects, I could not figure out how to do this.

Answer 3

For me, the missing feature was the ability to store my development stories in a way that worked for me. I need one template that I could use to create each story and the ability to link stories together. In the end, I ended up using the Wiki for this. I really did not need to-do lists or time tracking materials (this is handled separately for the entire company).

Answer 4

It’s hard to manage your own documentation. Readers do not give you a good way to format your code and become unmanageable if you have more than 10 in the project. Messages / files become messy if you get to many.

Answer 5

Assessment of tasks versus actual data is a big problem that I noticed. In addition, the ability to mark a team as invoiced will be a good feature that it lacks.

Answer 6

You cannot export your files, they do not even provide an api file.

So, if you exit, you will get some work to take your files.

I recently helped a client move 50 projects from Basecamp to Assembla. They said that Assembla is better suited for project management, and more features .

Answer 7

For me, the missing feature was the ability to store my development stories in a way that worked for me. I need one template that I could use to create each story and the ability to link stories together. In the end, I ended up using the Wiki for this. I really did not need to-do lists or time tracking materials (this is handled separately for the entire company).

Answer 8

In Basecamp, we were not able to track the time spent on our tasks, the task could not be assigned to several people, could not keep secrecy on important issues, could not save messages as private, encountered difficulties in processing trial versions, could not communicate freely with members of our team. So we went with ProofHub. It has schedules, To-dos, casper mode, private messages, a verification tool and a built-in browser. We deal well with him.

Answer 9

I find a big gap with Basecamp as a user. It is impossible to have people in the project (except for the “client”), who can see only certain to-do lists. I would like to be able to distribute roles for freelancers so that they have access only to certain task lists within the project.