Last summer I took a look at Redmine, an open source collaborative tool written in Ruby on Rails (cf article on Valtech Blog). I’m currently starting to use Redmine for one project I’m involved in, and I’m promoting it on several other projects at my client.
I was previously a great fan of Trac, and Redmine does now provide real advantages. It provides most of Trac features (issue tracking, wiki, roadmap, code repository browser and links between these modules), plus additional modules : News, discussion forum, basic time tracking associated with issue tracking, generation of changelog, calendar view.
In addition to completely new modules, Redmine also provides a very slick interface. For example tickets can be updated in batch mode. This is really useful for instance when allocating tickets to milestones of the project (in agile jargon, you would use this for your sprint backlog definition). Code changes related to issues appear on the issue page, as well as related issues. Moreover, you can specify keywords like “fixes” or “closes” so that tickets get closed automatically when you check-in code with a comment including “fixes #123″.
Redmine is inherently multi-project (projects and one level of sub projects) and provides all its administration configuration in a web interface.
The administration interface includes custom field definition, custom workflow, permissions, integration with 6 code repositories, LDAP, etc. It provides quite advanced features : for example, when defining a custom field, you can just tick a checkbox to make this field searchable, mandatory, or make it appear in query criteria. You can even define a regular expression that the field must conform to.
Redmine modules (wiki, ticket tracking, news, forum, etc.) can be activated or de-activated per project. Each project can also choose whether to use custom fields or specific issue trackers with custom workflow.
Also, Redmine can be installed in minutes, it just requires Ruby on rails and a database (mySQL by default).
Redmine architecture allows the definition of plugins. A generic Continuous Integration plugin to obtain build results from RSS feeds already exist, as well as a plugin to display a google calendar as one tab in Redmine projects.
The product is already integrated with 6 version management systems : SVN, CVS (Not available in Trac), Mercurial, Bazaar, Darcs, Git.
And the cherry on top of the cake : even if there is no Mylin integration available specifically for Redmine, you can use Mylin’s Generic Web Repository Connector to get your Redmine tickets in Eclipse.
In terms of references, Redmine is used for building the next version of Typo3 (a Major open source CMS).
French Scrum User Group
Agile Alliance
Valtech
planet Valtech
