Project Management Software from the East

I am working for a Chinese IT company and YES, we do use project management tools. Actually, one of our products is for software project management and was originally developed for our team to manage software and technology projects .

It is ZenTao, an open source project manangement system. Zen(禅) and Tao(道) are the two Chinese characters that have rich meanings in both religion and culture. ZenTao takes the cutural meaning of Zen and Tao, and is expected to convey our understanding and thinking of management. Inspired by The Tao of Programming and The Zen of Programming, we named our software ZenTao.

It also adpots Scrum methodology and improves it in detailed workflow. Generally speaking, ZenTao is designed for development team to finish their work, not like other project management software which is for team leaders to just make plans.

ZenTao can be divided into three parts, Product, Project and Test. Product is for product owners to manage stories, make plans, release builds and draft roadmaps; Project is for development teams to do project planning, tasks and builds; Test is for testing team to do test cases, test plannings and bug management.

Our DEV team is greatly inspired by Zen philosophy, and thus ZenTao is practical and pragmatic, which reflects the principle of simplicity in Zen. It has robost features and easy to operate. Zentao is well structured and can be flexibly extended.

Innovations

1. ZenTao aims to track and cover the whole process of software development. Open source project management software, such as Dotproject, Redmine, Trac, and bug managment software, such as Mantis, Testlink, BugFree, are single featured, e.g. add a labele of feature, task or bug to an issue, which means it lacks strict management and process tracking.

2. Extension mechanism. ZenTaoPHP is an independent framework developed by our team. Based on this framework, ZenTao can achieve a complete and thorough extension mechanism. A lot of open source software has an extension mechanism, but these are often based on an event or a hook mechanism, which can only be partially changed. With the dynamic interpretation of PHP, it will be easier to extend ZenTao into a completely new software.

ZenTao App is also available on IOS and Android App store for ZenTao Pro users. ZenTao is an open source software. You can find the source code on GitHub, or download it from our website to try it.