The Best Applications for Project Management: From Planning to Communication

Figure out what is best for your team's productivity by starting here.

Operational issues are one of the most complex moments in every business. If your business involves various processes and groups of professionals, applications can deal with the main issues.

How do you define what tools does your team need? Collect communication use-cases that the team utilizes at the time, then analyze current processes and company needs, and think what needs may be present in the future.

In this article, we want to discuss what tools and applications can help you organize the work of your team more effective.

For Planning

Online organizers can help you plan and distribute tasks and control the process of its implementation. There are various online services and applications available. Below we want to share the most popular and highly-functional services that can help you keep your project under control.

Trello

Trello is perhaps one of the most famous web services for organizing tasks in the form of work boards. The basic part of the service is free. To use extensions and additional tools you need to sign up for a paid pricing plan. It is possible to add checklists and set priorities. It can sync with Slack, GitHub, Salesforce, Evernote, Google Drive, and more. It works great with Kanban projects, and the application is also available for macOS and Windows. There are free and paid options. The service runs on the web and as an application on macOS and Windows.

Available for iOS and Android.

Jira

Many companies use Jira to manage projects, as it's ideal for working with Scrum. Jira allows you to plan sprints and projects in general, delegate tasks and collect them in backlog, specify priorities and track deadlines. Employees can create separate boards for several issues. Users can comment and discuss the task and attach files. The service can be hosted on the company’s server or in the cloud. Jira has simple pricing plans depending on the number of staff.

Available for iOS and Android.

MeisterTask

MeisterTask almost completely duplicates the functionality of Trello. A distinctive feature is an integration with Slack, GitHub, Zendesk. The application is also available for macOS and Windows. MeisterTask has free and paid pricing plans.

Available for iOS and Android.

Asana

Asana allows you to distribute tasks, set priorities and assign deadlines. Here you can track the status of the project, plan sprints, and make reports. Goals can be visualized in the calendar. Asana works in the browser and applications like Microsoft Office, Google Suite apps, Dropbox, and more.

Available for iOS and Android.

Bitrix24

This service includes various tools that help automate and optimize business processes. With its help you can schedule tasks for several projects at the same time, assign executors, measure time remained, exchange messages, communicate in live chat, and more. Besides, Bitrix24 includes CRM and a free desktop app for video calls, messaging, and file exchange. The service can run on your own server. If your company is up to 12 employees, you can use it for free. Service has various pricing plans according to your needs. Runs on Windows and macOS.

Available for iOS and Android.

For In-Team Communications

Communication is an essential part of all business processes. Along with emails, you can use various applications to organize group chats and share information with your team.

Slack

Slack is a convenient corporate messenger with various settings and options. Here you can create chat rooms, conduct voice and video calls, share files, use multiple integrated tools, and more. It is suitable for communication within almost any team. Slack is free of charge for small teams and there's a paid subscription available for the companies who wish to make Slack their hub for projects and communication. This service is web-based, and the only thing that makes Slack perfect is an application available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone.

Skype

Skype is a traditional audio and video communication tool for colleagues, clients, and remote staff who live abroad. You can create group chats, write direct messages, and exchange files. The application is for communication only. The main problem that users face is usability. For example, to see a message during a call, you need to open the corresponding section manually. The application can run on macOS and Windows.

Available for iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.

Mattermost

It’s an open-source alternative to Slack. Mattermost creates a single space for team communication with easy access to information related to project with the ability to export the history. It allows to communicate in groups, collaborate on tasks, share files, and receive notifications. As a bonus, the application can be hosted on the company’s server. The application can be installed on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Available for iOS and Android.

Google Hangouts

Hangouts is a less popular counterpart to Skype, which does an excellent job with the same features. You can perform video and phone calls, send direct messages and start conversations in groups. It is available online or as a Chrome extension.

Available for iOS and Android.

Microsoft Teams

The free version allows use chat, audio and video calls (individual, group, and team), 10 Gb storage, integration with Microsoft Office, integration with 140 services (Trello, Evernote, etc.). If you want to use all the features of Microsoft Teams, you need to subscribe to Office 365. Desktop versions are available for Windows and macOS.

Available for iOS and Android.

Time Tracking

No matter you work with a small or a big team, you will need to track the staff productivity and make sure that every employee keeps up the deadline.

Toggl

Toggl is a cross-platform time tracker. There is a possibility of working in a team and sharing information with clients. You can change profiles — to separately count the time spent on several side projects. This feature is also useful for those employees who work part-time. Automatically builds neat and visual reports. The service proposes free and paid pricing plans. It can be used as an extension in Chrome and Firefox. Besides, the desktop version is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Available for iOS and Android.

Timely

This service gives an ability to plan, create reports, set hourly rates, and budget features, integration with calendar, and more. Timely has a very user-friendly interface: you can immediately see the duration of the task and define time left. One con – currently, the service works only for a fee. As an option, you can try a free trial version. Timely has a desktop version for macOS and Windows.

Available for iOS and Android.

HubStaff

HubStaff is a desktop and mobile application that allows tracking the employees’ performance. The application allows to take screenshots, monitor activity, create reports, and more. The desktop version is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Also, the application has an extension for Chrome.

Available for iOS and Android.

Summing Up

There are a lot of applications available for managing your projects; you can find absolutely any software suitable for the needs of your particular company. The problem is choice. Experiment with applications, apply various tools, compare instruments that are important to fulfill the needs of your team and company’s goals.

Credits to:  Florence Clark

Source: https://dzone.com/articles/the-best-applications-for-project-management-from

Should you trust the default settings in JVM?

Source: http://plumbr.eu/blog/should-you-trust-the-default-settings-in-jvm

Should you trust the default settings in JVM?November 28, 2012, by Nikita Salnikov-Tarnovski

JVMs are considered smart nowadays. Not much configuration is expected – just set the maximum heap to use in the startup scripts and you should be good to go. All other default settings are just fine. Or so some of us mistakenly thought. Actually there is a lot going on during runtime which cannot be automatically adjusted for performance, so I am going to walk you through what and when to tweak throughout a case study I recently faced.

But before jumping to the case itself, some background about the JVM internals being covered. All following is relevant for Oracle Hotspot 7. Other vendors or older releases of the Hotspot JVM’s most likely ship with different defaults.

JVM default options

First stop: JVM tries to determine whether it is running on a server on a client environment. It does it via looking into the architecture and OS combination. In simple summary:

ArchitectureCPU/RAMOSDefault

i586	Any	MS Windows	Client
AMD64	Any	Any	Server
64-bit SPARC	Any	Solaris	Server
32-bit SPARC	2+ cores & > 2GB  RAM	Solaris	Server
32-bit SPARC	1 core or < 2GB RAM	Solaris	Client
i568	2+ cores & > 2GB  RAM	Linux or Solaris	Server
i568	1 core or < 2GB RAM	Linux or Solaris	Client

As an example – if you are running on an Amazone EC2 m1.medium instance on 32-bit Linux you would be considered running on a client machine by default.

This is important because JVM optimizes completely differently on client and on server – on client machines it tries to reduce startup time and skips some optimizations during startup. On server environments some startup time is sacrificed to achieve higher throughput later.

Second set of defaults: Heap sizing. If your environment is considered to be a Server determined according to the previous guidelines, your initial heap allocated will be 1/64 of the memory available on the machine. On 4G machine, it would mean that your initial heap size will be 64MB. If running on extremely low memory conditions (<1GB) it can be smaller, but in this case I would seriously doubt you are doing anything reasonable. Have not seen a server in this millenia with less than gig of memory. And if you have, I’ll remind you that a GB of DDR costs less than $20 nowadays …

But this will be the initial heap size. The maximum heap size will be the smallest of either ¼ of your total memory available or 1GB. So in our 1.7GB Amazon EC2 m1.small instance the maximum heap size available for the JVM would be approximately 435MB.

Next along the line: default garbage collector used. If you are considered to be running on a client JVM, the default applied by the JVM would be Serial GC (-XX:+UseSerialGC). On server-class machines (again, see the first section) the default would be Parallel GC (-XX:+UseParallelGC).

There is a lot more going on on with the defaults, such as PermGen sizing, different generation tweaks, GC pausing limits, etc. But in order to keep the size of the post under control, lets just stick with the aforementioned configurations. For the curious ones – you can read further about the defaults from the following materials:

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/vmoptions-jsp-140102.html
• http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/vm/gc-ergonomics.html
• http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/vm/server-class.html

Case Study

Now lets see how our case study behaves. And whether we should trust the JVM with the decisions or jump in ourselves.

Our application at hand was an issue tracker. Namely JIRA. Which is a web application with a relational database in the back-end. Deployed on Tomcat. Behaving badly in one of our client environments. And not because of any leaks but due to the different configuration issues in deployment. This misbehaving configuration resulted in significant losses in both throughput and latency due to the extremely long-running GC pauses. We managed to help out the customer, but for privacy’s sake we are not going to cover the exact details here. But the case was good, so we went ahead and downloaded the JIRA by ourselves to demonstrate some of the concepts we discovered from this real-world case study.

What is extremely nice from Atlassian is that the guys have got some nicely packaged load tests shipping with it. So we had a benchmark to use for our configuration.

We carefully unboxed our newly acquired JIRA and installed it on a 64-bit Linux Amazon EC2m1.medium instance. And ran the bundled tests. Without changing anything in the defaults. Which were set by the Atlassian team to -Xms256m -Xmx768m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

During each run we have collected GC logs using -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -Xloggc:/tmp/gc.log -XX:+PrintGCDetails and analyzed this statistics with the help of GCViewer.

The results were not too bad actually. We ran the tests for an hour, and out of this we lost just 151 seconds to the garbage collection pauses. Or 4.2% of the total runtime. And on the single worst-case gc pause was 2 seconds. So GC pauses were affecting both throughput and latency of this particular application. But not too much. But enough to serve as the baseline for this case study – in our real-world customer the GC pauses were spanning up to 25 seconds.

Digging into the GC logs surfaced an immediate problem. Most of the Full GC’s run were caused by the PermGen size expanding over time. Logs demonstrated that in total around 155MB of PermGen were used during tests. So we have increased the initial size of the PermGen to a bit more than actually used by adding -XX:PermSize=170m to the startup scripts. This decreased the total accumulated pauses from 151 seconds to 134 seconds. And decreased the maximal latency from 2,000ms to 1,300ms.

Then we discovered something completely unexpected. The GC used by our JVM was in fact Serial GC. Which, if you have carefully followed our post should not be the case – 64-bit Linux machines should always be considered server-class machines and the GC used should be Parallel GC. But apparently this is not the case. Our best guess at this point was that – even though the JVM launches in server mode, it still selects the GC used based on the memory and cores available. And as this m1.medium instance has 3.75GB memory but only one virtual core, the GC chosen is still serial. But if any of you guys have more insights on the topic, we are eager to find out more.

Nevertheless we changed the algorithm to  -XX:+UseParallelGC and re-ran the tests. Results – accumulated pauses decreased further to 92 seconds. Worst-case latency was also reduced to 1,200ms.

For the final test we attempted to try out Concurrent Mark and Sweep mode. But this algorithm failed completely on us – pauses were increased to 300 seconds and latency to more than 5,000ms. Here we gave up and decided to call it a night.

So just playing with two JVM startup parameters and spending few hours on configuration and interpretation of the results we had effectively increased the throughput and latency of the application. The absolute numbers might not sound too impressive – GC pauses reducing from 151 seconds to 92 seconds and worst-case latency from 2,000ms to 1,200ms, but lets bear in mind this was just a small test with only two configuration settings. And looking from the % point of view – hey, we have both improved the GC pause-related throughput and reduced the latency by 40%!

In any case – we now have one more case to show you that – performance tuning is all about setting the goals, measuring, tuning and measuring again. And maybe you are just as lucky as we and can make your users 40% happier by just changing two configuration options …