Redmine

Hi.

I use RedMine to manage projects for a long time, and it fits my needs very well except one thing: there are no calculated custom fields. Let me explain what I mean and what I need.

The usual cycle before implementation an issue looks like: New -> In progress -> Need details -> In progress -> ….. Need details -> In progress -> Estimated. Then, taking into account a priority and estimated time a manager and/or a client can select issues to be implemented/fixed for the next release. For these issues the process look likes, in general: Estimated -> In progress -> Resolved -> Reopened … In progress -> Resolved -> Closed.

I would like to add 2 custom field available for each issue:

• Count of changes. It increases on any changes of issue (assignee, status, Done, etc). It indicates activities around the issue. The more changes the more attention should be taken. I would like to see these hot issues on the top of the list.
• Count of (unsuccessful) attempts to resolve an issue. It increases when the status has been changed to Resolved (or Reopened). In general, it indicates a possible problem with implementation of an issue (maybe because of its complexity, ect). Something is definitely wrong with an issue if a developer has been trying to resolve it a few times, and QA reopens it again and again. I would like to see these problematic issues on the top of the list.

(I don’t want to discuss here if these indicators are good or bad; these questions of methodology.)

I have looked for possible solutions at the forums, but it seems there is no one ready to use. It seems I should implement a plugin for RedMine… Could you please roughly estimate how difficult this task is (say, for a beginner like me or for an expert): a day, a week, a month? Maybe there are some samples that I could reuse? There are a couple of example how to add custom fields (https://projects.littlestreamsoftware.com/projects/show/redmine-budget, https://github.com/theodoreb/redmine_user_pain), but they look a little bit complicated, at least for me. Maybe somebody has already implemented exactly what I need?

Regards,

Alex