[tptacek]

For the record, and yes I'm repeating myself:

Their actual customers are service practices (designers, copywriters, event planners, marketing organizations, business consultants) whose workflow consists of "1. discuss some kind of file, 2. create some kind of file, 3. upload file, 4. discuss file, 5. goto 1". For that workflow, it's great.

It does not work for projects with multiple independently timeboxed steps, or for projects that have complex dependencies. The dependencies need to work like "step 2 depends on file from step 1; step 3 depends on files from step 2".

[daveschappell]

I might be repeating myself too, but go check out who they market themselves to, and how they describe their product:

http://basecamphq.com/buzz

[tptacek]

I really don't understand what you're trying to get at. I'm telling you what Basecamp works well for, and what I believe it was designed to do. You're telling me that you disagree with the marketing copy on their website. I didn't write that marketing copy, and I'm not interested in critiquing it.

Regardless of how your mental mapping of their marketing copy works, they've been completely explicit about the fact that Basecamp is not designed for people who want fine-grained schedule-based management. They've written extremely popular blog posts about why they think that kind of project management is evil. You can agree or disagree with that (I do both), but you can't tell them they have to add features they don't want to add just because you have a different definition of "project management".

[swindsor]

I think my issue is that I totally agree that fine-grained project management is evil, meetings suck, I read the books, listen to podcasts, drink the kool-aid, etc.

But, Basecamp is a project management tool. It allows you to track tasks (and due-dates), and milestones. I don't care about task dependancies, or gannt charts.

I do care about agile development. I do need to see the status of my project in an aggregate way (are we close yet?) Even understanding that estimates are wild guesses, task-level timeboxing is better than working backwards from dates. I can't image the due-date feature working well except for in some very narrow circumstances.

I guess overall if my definition is "project management" is different, then wouldn't they want their product to work to handle users like me? Or not, and that's okay. I'm just saying that I'm cut out of the niche of users they are looking for, whether it be intentional or not.

[tptacek]

I don't think Basecamp is a particularly good way to manage agile software development projects, or really software development projects of any kind, and especially not software development projects that have multiple cooperating team members.

Like the commenter downthread said, you want Pivotal Tracker, not Basecamp.