Two years ago our team get to choose from project management tools. We considered, compared existing solutions and eventually decided in favor of Redmine.

Benefits:

  • Easy to use
  • It is a good combination of bug tracker and project management tools
  • Open Source under GNU license
  • Large number of 3d party plugins
  • Suites Agile methodology
  • Non – SAAS architecture. We wanted everything running on our server so that we could easily tune it to our needs
  • Ruby based (we know well)

BTW, it is possible to export issues from utest (croud testing) to your local Redmine.

We still fully satisfied with Redmine, and strongly believe that we made the right choice. What we would like to share are couple changes we made to make it even more convenient (we think so) and also what we plan to add in the near future.

Roadmap – this is our primary instrument

Roadmap (version) is our plan that matches short-term and long-term goals and helps us to meet those goals. Each version represents single Sprint (it can be one week or more), in addition we have specific versions like “~clarification” (something that requires clarification with client) & “~mind” (similar to backlog).

A few improvements we did using Roadmap. See below default screens and ours next to it.

So basically what we did:

  • We always show Bugs + Features by default (so there is no need to check it back after page reload)
  • We changed the style around completed tasks title completely (fully gray it and strikethrough) for better readability
  • We show assignee & progress inline
  • We show priority icon inline
  • We’ve changed sorting. Everything sorted by status (closed / open), priority and type (feature, bug)
  • Also we are running Redmine using mongrel rails for better performance

Issue details page

We’ve added issue number inline with its title in order to more quickly copy and paste full reference for example to your commit to SVN

We split History into two tabs in order to keep it short and informative.

Future plans:

  • Add cool status indicator for each version under roadmap as sun or rainy depends on progress
  • Show small thumbnails of attached to the issue screens plus light box on hover instead of separate page.
  • Add checkbox right to each item in roadmap to quickly set status to resolved (like Basecamp)

Would be great to know about your enhancements if any. And we can post code changes if you ask :)