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Jeremy Hylton notes the importance of keeping good notes, along with a good chunk of sound advice from the article Coding Smart: People vs. Tools by Donn M. Seeley, which I finally got around to reading. I'd love to hear his review of CVSTrac, and whether it's feasible in a Zope scenario.

Ed Taekema has noted the use of wiki's in this area, along with several related articles.

'Coding Smart' felt slightly dogmatic, but appropriately so. The initial watch out--that new languages may kill your development time bugged me, as it's one of the reasons I've used to avoid writing testing apps in Python and redundantly tested manually. His other point that the new language may not be transferable to other workers I feel is a non-issue with Python. Idioms. Ouch, they are the difference between "Pythonic" and "Python", eh? I admit here I was setbacked. Was this general purpose programming language was leading down another esoteric path, reducing my psuedocodish Python to n00bish dribble or unreadable shortcuts? (*What cocky programmer wouldn't claim to be able to pick up another language in a few days, let alone debug it? )

Later Seeley moved into "use psuedo-code", which I dug but raised an eyebrow to, Given Python's readable code and experiment and validation capabilities. Python does add a lot of value here, and of course not everwhere. I'd like to tie in frustrations of trying to communicate in user stories when peer coder speaks in schema tweeks and algorithms, or that generally good problem statements inherit the solution, but won't. Peer reviews are also cool when common values are apparent and personal dogma is chained.

Outlining. +1. This is what I use Word for.

My college business professor (and many others) repeatedly recommended keeping a profesional journal.  I've never been able to keep up a paper journal.  My personal wiki is primarily "notes to self" and similar links. Good notes in change logs are critical, and prefer then to be tacked within the source, as a "blog within a file" type of thing. Code diff's are no replacement, and are far from convenient--especially when trying to grok code and it's history.  My personal wiki has a blog apsect with entry form on the front page. This causes more blog and less wiki, but without it the time it took me to figure out where to put the resource would derail many of my intentions.

Thought of the day: When folks complain about documentation, what part of knowlege management has failed?