update on project management/ticketing system

Hello,

having worked with Cloph on some real-life examples today (thanks a lot for your work and time!), I'd like to give you an update on the project management/ticketing system.

TL;DR:Redmine looks very promising. Some further evaluation to come, final decision within the next weeks.

Most of you know that a few weeks ago, I invited the community to test our Redmine instance at https://intranet.documentfoundation.org/redmine/ - and in fact, you still can participate in testing!

Reason for looking for such a tool is that with all those tasks and projects, and also people working for TDF these days, we need some easy mechanism to see where stand. I am not a friend of overly exaggerated project management, but some basics can help for sure. :wink:

Note that we do _NOT_ intend to replace BugZilla with it - I can't emphasize that enough. BugZilla is a different tool for different use.

We also do not plan to fold all other tools into Redmine for the moment. Where it's possible, we will, but looking at what it provides, neither the calendaring, nor the wiki, nor the file repository are likely to fulfill even our basic needs. We'll look further, but for the moment, my main area of investigation is the project management and ticketing.

So, the good news are:

We really love Redmine so far when it comes to ticketing and project management! :slight_smile: It fulfills all the mandatory (plus many more) requirements pointed out at http://pad.documentfoundation.org/p/infra (a bit further down the page)

The only drawback - and difference to OTRS - is that Redmine expects, like BugZilla IMHO, an account for each user. The "OTRS-style" Cc'ing of external addresses does not work. There was a plugin for older Redmine versions, which unfortunately crashes with recent ones. We might be able to fix it (we have many developers in the community, I heard :slight_smile: - but it does not work out of the box. Plus, OpenID is supposed to work, but failed in our tests.

Besides, Redmine looks really attracting. So, how to continue:

I will work with Cloph on some more real-life experience with concrete tasks, to see what can be improved and what could be a blocker. I'd also like to have a look at the forks ChiliProject and OpenProject, if they have some benefits to us (I read something about a meetings assistance feature in OpenProject which might be nice). I'm not heavily in favor of looking at other systems, as to me, Redmine or its forks simply "is it". Feedback on other tools welcome, of course.

Then the infra team will have a call the next one to two weeks to further clarify details. If possible, we'll make this a public call for everyone to join.

Before, we will also have a closer look at OTRS again, which contains lots of current data and is preferred by a few contributors as well, to have a fair comparison.

There is no final decision yet, and feedback is always welcome - but so far, there are lots of sympathies for it, so to speak.

More then later...

Florian

Hi,

TL;DR:Redmine looks very promising. Some further evaluation to come,
final decision within the next weeks.

This is exciting and good news! Does this also mean that OTRS will very likely
be decommissioned? Assuming so, I removed references by gerrit still around (I
hope I got them all).

Best,

Bjoern

Hi,

This is exciting and good news! Does this also mean that OTRS will very likely
be decommissioned? Assuming so, I removed references by gerrit still around (I
hope I got them all).

that question is undecided yet.

Redmine and OTRS have two different uses (IMHO): While Redmine is more an internal project management system, OTRS is rather a ticketing system.

For my uses, I rather need some sort of project management, not so much a ticketing system. However, I know that Andreas and Alin from the infra team have needs for ticketing.

I personally would like to avoid too many tools, but if there is a concrete case that Redmine (or one of its forks) can't fulfill, we probably won't shutdown OTRS - it's undecided yet, and we'll let you know in time of course. We won't pull the plug from one day to another. :slight_smile:

Talking of that: Anyone here on this list who also has a concrete need for ticketing in the way OTRS provides? Any "killer application" I have missed?

Florian