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Redmine vs Bugzilla for developers

Added by Rob Lanphier over 14 years ago

Hi everyone,

I'm helping Wikimedia Foundation out with an evaluation of project management tools. We're currently using Bugzilla now, but we have a test install of Redmine running here: http://project2.wikimedia.org

Here's some info about our latest thinking on the topic:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Tracker/PM_tool

...and a recent mailing list discussion on the subject:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/48439

If you read through that mailing list discussion, you'll note that there's project manager enthusiasm for Redmine, the developer enthusiasm is not so much. In particular, they're less than enthusiastic about enduring a migration without a big payoff on the other side. Looking at Redmine vs Bugzilla from the perspective of a developer that doesn't get a lot of value out of things like roadmaps and due dates, what is the big payoff for them?


Replies (1)

RE: Redmine vs Bugzilla for developers - Added by Eric Davis over 14 years ago

Looking at Redmine vs Bugzilla from the perspective of a developer that doesn't get a lot of value out of things like roadmaps and due dates, what is the big payoff for them?

Different developers have different needs. I don't know what your developers need or what they are missing but I can explain the things that drew me to Redmine originally:

  • I owned my own data (compared to a hosted system). Not relevant to you.
  • I could turn off things I didn't want to use right away. (e.g. took me about a year to start using Forums).
  • I could easily extend it to be customized to my specific workflow.
  • It was under active development. It's under even more active development now.

I'll try to answer some of the questions I saw on the thread:

From: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/48446

I'm also skeptical of time tracking, period. It involves bookkeeping
that is secondary to everyone's primary goals on any given day. And if
you do it inconsistently, it becomes worse than useless. (I don't see
any of the top projects on Redmine that seem to be using time tracking
seriously.)

Time tracking is optional. You can configure it so PM and employees can track their time, while volunteer contributors can ignore it. As far as top projects using time tracking, that's false. I've been tracking all of my time in Redmine for over 2 years now. I have several customers who are tracking even more time and have integrated it with plugins that use that data for things like scheduling, budgets, and other PM activities.

From: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/48461

Defect #1: Where is the "Report a bug" feature?

#2 - The member list at http://project2.wikimedia.org/projects/mediawiki

seems needlessly long.

Re 1: It looks like your Redmine instance has the "Create a New Issue" turned off for the Anonymous role. A simple checkbox in the Admin panel > Permission will enable that.

Re 2: It looks like every user was added as a member to the project. Depending on the scale and privacy (i.e. public editable) of your projects you might be able to reduce the number of members on the project.

Eric Davis

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