Redmine

I'm not a user of the Gantt view, so I recommend you to have a look and give a try to it in the demo:
http://demo.redmine.org/projects/sandbox/issues/gantt

The Gantt Chart view is useful, but very hard to maintain. You need to move each issue manually if you need to adjust start/due dates.

Are there plans for a way to slide a group of issues in time, say forward or back a week? One way to do this would be on Bulk Edit of issues, to accept '+10', or '-10' in the Start/Due Date fields, to push forward or backward 10 days.

I seem to recall I make such a request long time ago, but still the Gannt chart lacks much functionality.
My reguests was in the area of just dragging a gannt-bar to change the dates.
Yours surely makes sense as well

I see in the roadmap of Redmine that there is only one feature (subproject nesting) I would love to see a "Gannt revisited" as a version 0.9 feature

M Solares wrote:

• Do I need to manually enter a Start time and Due Time, AND an estimated work time for each issue? This seems like duplication of information.

Agreed: this breaks DRY. The editor/widget for inputting temporal information relating to Issues should be improved to "understand" the temporal relationships between start times, due times and estimated work times (unless the idea is to sometimes have one assignee work on two or more Issues simultaneously; i.e. to have Issues overlapping temporally?).

• If I set a Due Date for one issue, can 'blocked' or 'preceded' issues have their start times updated automatically to reflect that relationship?

I wish! But so far at least, Redmine doesn't seem to be doing this :( (Readers, please correct me if I'm mistaken!)

How is the time span of the issue and the amount of hours needed breaking DRY? Often people work on several different issues, one issue might have a due date a few days after the start date even if it only takes a few hours to actually complete the issue, WHEN you work on it. Start date doesn't mean "work on this, and only on this, until it is done".

Stefan Hållén wrote:

How is the time span of the issue and the amount of hours needed breaking DRY? Often people work on several different issues, one issue might have a due date a few days after the start date even if it only takes a few hours to actually complete the issue, WHEN you work on it. Start date doesn't mean "work on this, and only on this, until it is done".

Well, that's one interpretation. There are others. Clearly, part of the difficulty here is that Redmine's handling of scheduling is - while no worse than that of many other time/issue trackers - ambiguous.

Agreed. It's not really easy for a PM to plan the work that needs to be done.