There are a number of needed infrastructure pieces in order to effectively work with a team of developers and stakeholders. If you’re using a technique like lean and want to provide CI (continuous integration) along with a Kanban board then you can use web sites that provide this infrastructure.

Scott Hanselman  gave a talk at an OreDev in November 2009 titled, “Information Overload and Managing the Flow” that discusses some web sites for all the information that you receive on a daily basis. While his talk was specific to managing information the point is that there are free web sites for doing this.

Free is good but for a team it is no longer free. The free part is more geared for a single person working on a single project. This is ideal for trying out the web site and actually doing a small project.

What types of web sites would I use? For a team you need a few different web sites because I haven’t been able to locate an all-in-one web site that provides everything. If the team is going to be using a short iteration cycle approach and having the work exposed to the stakeholders you need to have four main areas covered.

You need some where to manage the short iteration cycles of the project. There are several ways to do this and for this discussion I will be using the Kanban approach. A web site I like is Agile Zen. The plan that fits best happens to be the most popular. This is the PRO plan at $29/month. It allows 10 projects, 10 collaborators, 10GB of file storage with email and IM notification and SSL encryption. This works good with a 3 person team and a few stakeholders.

The next area is you need somewhere to put the source code. The web site I like is Unfuddle. The thing I like about this web site is you can use either SVN or Git. The plan that I like is the Compact plan because it is the first plan to allow SSL. You really don’t want to be sending your code unencrypted. The plan provides 2GB of storage and 10 active projects for 20 people. In addition you get a dashboard, milestones and bug tracking.

So with source control and project management in place you now need a place to host the work. I currently use a hosting site for this blog but I don’t like the idea of using it to host the project. The reason is I want complete control of the project and many hosting web site charge more money for complete control. You can’t blame them because if you have control then you need to be hosted on dedicated server and not sharing a server. So I looked into cloud hosting. I haven’t made up my mind on what I want here. I’m mulling over two directions to take.

The first is using something like Amazon’s EC2. This service provides a resizable computing capacity in the cloud. Basically Amazon provides you with a server in the cloud.

The second option I’m considering is to use a VMWare hosting site. What this allows is a server that will have a VMWare image that can be used to deploy new web servers by deploying a new VMWare image. I like this and it may be the way I’ll go.

The important thing about a hosting site is that I have access to a database, preferably MS SQL Server. So no matter what way I decide I’ll need a db.

The last thing to consider is continuous integration. There are a couple of CI applications that I like, Hudson and TeamCity. Hudson it a java based application that runs in Tomcat and is built with a plug-in architecture. TeamCity is a CI and build management system offered by JetBrains (maker of ReSharper). What I really want is to get it free and put it on the hosting site.

That basically covers what I need have in place for a team developed project. There are other web sites to handle some of the things covered by Scott Hanselman and they may be needed too. These four areas address the infrastructure needs I have for team development.