If you are creating software of any king, whether it be proprietary or open source you need some software yourself to help you track the progress, bugs, and code review of your software project. This becomes even more of a need when you have a team of programmers working on 1 application/software. This is what InDefero is. It’s an open source software forge written in PHP that allows you to do and track various things for your software project.

What is a Software Forge? A software forge allows your team to manage the life cycle of your software with a total integration of the code, issues, documentation and communication with your user base. A good software forge is critical to the success of your software development. The screenshot below gives you a little bit of a better idea of what this application looks like in action.

Other Features Include:

• Multiple projects with one installation.
• Bug and issue tracker.
• Collaborative documentation.
• Downloads area.
• Code browser with git, Subversion and Mercurial.
• Code review.
• Project timeline.
• Management interface to create and administer the projects.
• Tags on issues, downloads and documentation pages.
• Powerfull search engine.
• Diff visualization of the commits.
• Issue watch list.
• Personal dashboard.
• Private/Public projects and more fine grained access control.
• Atom feeds.
• Free software, GNU GPL.
• Easy registration of new people with email confirmation.
• In line display of text files from the repository with syntax highlighting.
• REST API with JSON answers.
• Ticket file attachments for patches, images and more.
• Available in your language.

What does all this mean for the Business Man?

If you are an entrepreneur trying to develop a new piece of software, it’s important for you to give your programmers working for you the best tools to help them succeed. Particularly when you have more than 1 programmer on 1 project, it’s important that they constantly communicate through conversation, bugs, and actual code the progress each other are making. Doing so will save you hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars!

In this case you would use Indefero as an application for your developers to track these specific items on your project. As the user, you would give your programmers feedback on the software by submitting bugs and notes through Indefero. This will streamline your communication with them and make your experience working with them much more pleasant.