At the company I work, we are really wanting to get into the agile methodology for developing software. One thing that I'm not excited about is the fact that management wants us to build a custom project management feature inside the company's Intranet.I think this is a total waste of time. There are many great third party tools available (e.g. Axosoft OnTime) that can do everything we need, and more. For how much development time it would cost us to build our own project management module, we could buy numerous licenses for a third party product.One concern is that, whilst we are writing code for a client, and using our custom Intranet project management module, we find bugs in the module that need fixing ASAP. That means having to stop work on the client code to fix the Intranet. That just puts shivers down my spine.Another worry I have is lack of functionality. This custom module is going to be so basic, that it will just feel really crap to use. That might sound a bit snooty, but for goodness sake, many third party tools are so feature rich, that the idea of having to write our own tool makes feel very uneasy. In fact, I can't be bothered.What do you guys think?I'm going to raise this issue with my boss, since I feel it's such an important topic to talk about.EDIT:Thanks for the great responses, much appreciated. To summarize some of them:MoneyNaturally my boss does want to save money, by not forking out a few hundred 's for licenses. However, for us to write a custom tool, it will take x number of days, multiplied by approx 500, which is our costs. I don't see the business value in this.Management have mentioned that they want to sell the Intranet as a product in the future, but it's so custom to our needs (and downright basic), that in order to give it to another client, I can see us having to fork a version of the code and rebuild the majority of it anyway. So it's not like we're gaining anything there in reuse.FeaturesHaving our own custom module means not feature bloat - only the functionality we require will be in the product. My issue is that there are plenty of free, open-source project management tools out there with minimal features already. So even if cost is an issue, we could look into open-source. Again it all boils down to the fact that I don't see the point in writing a project management tool in this day and age. It's a bit like writing your own web browser - why?, what's the point?Although management are asking for this tool, just because they are, it does not mean I'm going to please them and do it just because they asked for it. If something does not make sense, then I will raise it as a concern.At the end of the day, it's the developers who write the code, it's the developers who make money for a business. Thus, as far I'm concerned, the devs have a very big role in deciding how a company should manage projects and what tools are used. I am Spartan, argh! :)Hmm, I've not been able to make this question a wiki for some reason, thus I'm going to have to pick an answer to accept.Edit:I had a meeting with my boss today. I told about my concerns on us writing a custom tool from scratch. I even showed him OnTime 2010, plus I ran an OnTime SDK example project which showed we could write our own custom code to interact with the data and do whatever we want. I showed all the lists, features, I could think of.But he wasn't convinced. Un-f@king-believable! :(So we will have to write everything from scratch, knowing full well that we could just buy a tool of the shelf to do the job. There's a lot of swear words I could use right now to describe how I'm feeling!EDIT:Responding to recent comments:1) A developer who says he can't be bothered.There were three devs in the team, including myself. One dev was full time on a client project, myself and the remaining dev were working on a big client project. That means myself and the other dev would have to work on the client project, as well as the custom management module - at the same time.The end result was that we ended up a management module, written in ASP.NET MVC by a dev with minimal MVC experience (I was only able to provide a small chunk of time to this module, as I was full time on the big client project). It wouldn't be unfair to say it was pretty crap (no fault of the dev). So yeah, I've no shame in saying I couldn't be bothered to split my time writing a pointless management module, whilst trying to also write a system for a client that were actually going to pay us.2) A developer who doesn't have confidence in his team to build even a simple application to be relatively polished and free of significant bugs (and this is a shop that accepts contract work?The company did great work, we delivered good software to clients - the devs were capable, as a team, to deliver good work. You've put words in my mouth there. I did have confidence in the team, but I wasn't confident they could build client systems on time, and to quality, whilst being distracted with this custom waste of time.3) The one everyone picked up on already, dictatorial management.Our director was pretty set in ways - he wanted the custom module regardless of the fact there were better options. It felt like a lost situation for us. Didn't feel great knowing that he didn't care what alternatives were available.EDIT:To put more context on the situation at the time - our boss wanted us to write the client app and the management module at the same time. They also wanted us to actually use the management module (user stories, tasks, etc) whilst it was being built i.e. dog fooding, with tasks related to the client project.So imagine building TFS, and developing a new version of Visual Studio, but using the in-development TFS to store your work items, user stories, notes, etc relating to the Visual Studio development project. Not cool.
Company wants to write custom project management tool, rather than use third party product
project management
Well, I've seen similar efforts before, and in general, they didn't turn out too bad. A custom-made tool comes with exactly the features your company needs, no bloat added. They are more flexible than any off-the-shelf product could ever be.Sure, it looks like a waste of time, and it probably is, but installing, configuring and getting used to a third-party-tool also takes some time.My take on the situation: If management wants it, do it. It's their responsibility to decided wether or not it is worth the effort.