You're unlikely to find top developers for reasonable sums -- Rails is hot right now but still young, so good Rails coders get paid a lot and there aren't a huge number of them.  That will even out a bit over time, though programming is always expensive, Rails or not.

  As far as tools for software project planning, Excel is a surprisingly good choice.  It's what Microsoft used for a long time and may still use.  It's actually a better choice than something like Microsoft Project, at least for software.

  UML tools (Together, Rose, etc) can be useful for software design and architecture, but will probably help you less as a non-coder.

  It depends a lot on what you want.  Are you doing project management and scheduling or software object design or UI design or something else?  These are different tasks, and different tools are useful for them.

--- On Wed, 10/7/09, omar al-jadda <[address removed]> wrote:

> From: omar al-jadda <[address removed]>
> Subject: [ruby-99] Software Modeling and Rails Shop
> To: [address removed]
> Date: Wednesday, October 7, 2009, 11:14 AM
> Hey Folks,
> 
> Was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on either tools
> or resources to do software project planning (for someone
> who is not a coder), for example ER or UML modeling?
> 
> Also, can anyone recommend a Rails-shop for building a
> somewhat simple application (specifically a Twitter app)? I
> am not having good luck finding top developers on
> Rent-a-coder, Elance, etc...
> 
> 
> thanks
> omar
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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