[larsen]

At $previous_job we were using RT to manage the spec -> dev -> QA -> deploy cycle. For each new task a new ticket is required. Project managers and team leaders split this ticket into smaller sub-activities (new tickets children of the original one) and assign them to developers. Each developer is responsible for including testing instructions in a ticket comment, and providing the references to revisions relevant for the test. When a developer is ready for QA, he passes the ticket to his project manager, who can test and decide if the activity is ready for QA. At the end of the process, QA receives a single ticket, with a set of dependent tickets each one with instructions about how to prepare the QA environment and do the test.

On top of that we built various tools. A web-based kanban board displaying the status of each task, command-line utilities to make developers' and QA guys' lives easier (for example, there was one adding comments to tickets for every commit; or another allowing PMs and QA to fetch the list of revisions needed for a task), and so on...

To build the tools we used RT::Client::REST, a Perl client for RT. Given the REST interface, though, I think you can find something for Python or any language you plan to work with.