evaluating Redmine

Hello,

today, I would like to invite you to evaluate Redmine, a project management system. _PLEASE_ read the following sections _COMPLETELY_ before proceeding, as they contain important details.

This evaluation has started out of two reasons:

(1) With the growing number of freelancers, we need to keep track of the paid work done for TDF, and the status of tasks and todos. In other words, we need some sort of project management system, which also the larger community can benefit from.

(2) The infrastructure team needs a ticketing system for handling their tasks. We have one in place already, but it is not used frequently, and we try to evaluate alternatives.

Ideally, those two requirements can be made fit together in one tool.

This also means that Redmine is _NOT_ meant as replacement for Bugzilla at all - not now, not later. Bugzilla fulfills a rather different set of requirements, focused on development, while we are looking for project management and ticketing, so I don't see a way to combine all three requirements in one tool.

While Redmine also offers a file storage, wiki, calendaring and other tools, they are _NOT_ part of the evaluation. Chances are we might use some of these functions to remove the variety of tools in place, but it is not the primary determining factor. For the wiki e.g. we cannot simply migrate away from MediaWiki, as we would lose important functionality and plugins that overweight the benefit of having everything in one place.

One more important note: This is explicitly called _EVALUATION_, which means _NO_ final decision has been made yet, _NO_ binding timeline exists, and _NOBODY_ is claiming it is the perfect tool for all of our purposes. We _EVALUATE_ and based on the results, we make a decision.

Please do _NOT_ rely on Redmine being a productive instance. It may vanish at _ANY_ time, with loss of _ALL_ data. Again, it is an _EVALUATION_, nothing to fully count on. Feel free to put productive tickets into it, but do not expect any stability or reliability.

All those warnings being said (I deemed that necessary given recent discussions on our tools), I hope I didn't scare you away. :wink: I'm more than happy if as many of you as possible test the tool and give us feedback what you like or dislike.

To create yourself an account, please navigate to

  https://intranet.documentfoundation.org/redmine/

and wait for the e-mail where you have to click a confirmation link, just like for the wiki, and then you are set up. You can then create tickets and play with the tool. For those who would like to have a deeper look, there's also a variety of Android apps available to use Redmine remotely.

For discussions, please use the website@global.libreoffice.org mailing list exclusively. Please also use this list if you want to have projects/queues created and/or get assigned as possible bug recipient with one of those.

For concrete bugs and wishes you have, please add them directly to http://pad.documentfoundation.org/p/infra so they don't get lost.

One last thing I'd like to ask for: Please be sensible in your requirements. While surely there are many wishlist items we can have a look at, we clearly need to identify blocking issues. Raising expectations so high that no tool can fulfill them will lead us no where, so again, be sensible. :slight_smile:

That being said, Redmine is a first step. We have some other tools on the radar that might fit, so - happy to hear the results of everyone's evaluation!

Florian

Not to be annoying, but...

Jira is pretty much the industry standard for this kind of stuff, do you
not fit in the requirements for the free open-source projects license?

I'm sure you've looked at all the available options anyway :slight_smile:

Hi Florian,

[RedMine update]

Thanks for the update, very much appreciated.

This also means that Redmine is _NOT_ meant as replacement for
Bugzilla at all - not now, not later. Bugzilla fulfills a rather
different set of requirements, focused on development, while we are
looking for project management and ticketing, so I don't see a way
to combine all three requirements in one tool.

Just to clarify: this does not preclude us reconsidering RedMine as a
replacement for Bugzilla in a decade or so, as its really hard to see now how
both Bugzilla and RedMine will develop in the long run. But bugtracking for
LibreOffice the product clearly is out of scope for the current RedMine
instance. :wink:

Please do _NOT_ rely on Redmine being a productive instance. It may
vanish at _ANY_ time, with loss of _ALL_ data. Again, it is an
_EVALUATION_, nothing to fully count on. Feel free to put productive
tickets into it, but do not expect any stability or reliability.

^^ :wink:

Best,

Bjoern