COMPARISON OF OPEN SOURCE TOOLS FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Software projects often fail, because they are not adequately managed. The establishment of effective and efficient project management practices still remains a key challenge to software organizations. Striving to address these needs, "best practice" models, such as, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) or the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), are being developed to assist organizations in improving project management. Although not required, software tools can help implement the project management process in practice. In order to provide comprehensive, low-cost tool support for project management, specifically, for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), in this paper we compare the most popular free/open-source web-based project management tools with respect to their compliance to PMBOK and CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV). The results of this research can be used by organizations to make decisions on tool adoptions as well as a basis for evolving software tools in alignment with best practices models.