I cannot believe I have not come across assembla sooner !

Assembla is a free service, it provides virtually everything you need to get a project up and running with a distributed team. It is a web front end built round subversion, and provides a whole host of project orientated features.

The features are all modules (termed tools) and can be added and removed from your project at any time.
The tools include:

  • SVN database
  • Online chat that records history
  • Image management for collaborative image design
  • mephisto (blog and site management)
  • Milestones for project management
  • Scrum - for assiting in team meatings
  • Tickets - bug / enhancement request tool

and a whole host of others. Essentially it seems anything you need for product development is provided apart from the development experience and a good idea. They can however provide the development experience if necessary as discussed later.

Within the space of half an hour, I had signed up, had a good look around, created a PRIVATE project, connected by SVN and checked in the first version, invited a friend to join the project by the on-line invite, played with the chat (which doesn’t hold your interest for too long when your the only person in the project chat room) and created a couple of tickets for bits to do in the project. I was nicely suprised to see lots of emails in my inbox when I did things like check code in and add new tickets, keeping my informed even if I was not currently on the site. It’s all very integrated and very well thought out, e.g. the change set notification emails provide links to the changeset online so you can see all the post comments and fiels changed.

Everything you’ll ever need for managing and communicating in a distributed project development seems to be there.

So what do Assembla get out of it? Well it seems their main drive is not orientated around the project provision, you can pay extra for professional services (like team time tracking, off site synchronisation branding, etc. ) which for the service level is in my opinion is a very reasonable price. However, their main income comes from the non-project side of your account. You can choose without cost, to fill in details and publish your skills and profile on their site. This database of highly skilled people can then be tapped into by others who wish to hire developers. Someone who has a good idea can create a project site, source developers, manage the project and it’s progress and pay the developers all with out leaving assembla. The payment scheme operates similar to paypal, moving money into credit and the paying it to the developers assembla account when they have completed the work. There are various mechanisms for getting money in and out of the assembler account, of which assembler take a margin and a reasonable one at that.

So there you have it, all the benefits of sourceforge, etc with a lot more additional tools and integration. The ability to create open and closed source projects under the same user account. The site is responsive, organised, and easy to pickup, but what do you expect from a site written in Ruby on Rails?

Oh, and it’s free. What more could a developer want ?