Spark is a project management portal designed to help projects of all sizes write software quickly and efficiently. It is designed to make managing software projects easier and faster, and also to encourage best practices across all members of the team.
The goal for Spark is to handle six major ‘facets’ of software development:
- Release management
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Define and track projects, versions, and milestones
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Identify trends to aide in future scheduling
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Provide a high-level view of completion.
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- Requirements management
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Track, read, and modify user stories and requirements from anywhere.
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Track which members of the team are developing each story / requirement.
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- Documentation
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Read and modify documentation, both for developers and end users.
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- Issue tracking
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Track issues on projects down to the version, milestone, or even requirement level.
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- File downloads
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Allow users to download files tied to a specific project and/or version.
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Provide multiple types of the same file and allow the user to choose (or, optionally, using browser characteristics like Accept: and User-Agent:).
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- Discussion
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Communicate with team members, testers, and the user community.
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Spark is designed from the ground up to have a customisable UI, voting on issues and requirements, extremely granular authentication, and mobile device support. It also features a JSON and XML API (both still in development) so you can write your own apps against Spark.
Also, there are very few open-source requirements management software, and the ones that are on the market today are not designed for today’s Agile development methods. Spark will get out of your way when you want it to, and keep you on track when you need it to.
SSL is highly recommended for all instances of Spark, but is not enforced in the Rails code. You should configure your Web server to serve Spark only from HTTPS; this configuration is beyond the scope of this document.
Spark comes with a friendly, easy-to-use Web-based setup form (ala WordPress). Just point your browser to your new Spark instance and fill in a few details about your environment.