Redmine

Alexey Yurganov: Just so this issue doesn't get forgotten, I've filed a ticket for it: http://backlogsplugin.morphexchange.com/issues/192

hans van den Bosch: Did you mean to change "items.position ASC" to "position ASC" ?

No, I only changed:
parent_id=0 to items.parent_id=0 on line 95

Thought so. :-) It's odd because it already like that in the parent-id branch. Oh well.

Anyways, feel free to file any other bugs on the issue tracker at http://backlogsplugin.morphexchange.com/projects/redmine-backlogs. Sign up for an account as demo doesn't have enough rights to that project.

Thanks!

Mark Maglana wrote:

Alexey Yurganov: Just so this issue doesn't get forgotten, I've filed a ticket for it: http://backlogsplugin.morphexchange.com/issues/192

i've just register, and trying to publish the patch from git (in production i use the Mercurial and SVN, GIT is new for me)

hans van den Bosch: Did you mean to change "items.position ASC" to "position ASC" ?

he meens i think what parent_id field is also has in Issue, thats why we have an SQL error on ActiveRecord::Base

the patch look like this

def self.find_by_project(project)
-    find(:all, :include => :issue, :conditions => "issues.project_id=#{project.id} and parent_id=0", :order => "position ASC")
+    find(:all, :include => :issue, :conditions => "issues.project_id=#{project.id} and issues.parent_id=0", :order => "position ASC")
   end

this was fix, i think, in last commit on branch parent_id

Try the parent-id branch I just pushed to github: http://github.com/relaxdiego/backlogs/commits/parent-id

by the way: Mark. It is very great plugin !!!

UPDATE: THE DEMO SITE HAS MOVED TO https://backlogsdemo.morphexchange.com/projects/demo/backlogs

Alexey Yurganov: thanks :-)

Hi,

First I would like to thank you for the development of such great plugin!

i'm having some issues with the plugin.

It seems the backlog screen is not editable to me. I can't change anything from the backlog tab (move to a sprint or edit name for example), i added my user as a manager to the project, checked the roles.....nothing seems to work.

Thanks

Hi, the plugin seems very nice, but when I installed it on my Redmine I couldn't edit anything in the backlog (like Felipe).

On the demo site it works fine for me though so it is definitly not browser related.

I have 1 kind of bug that I noticed on the demo site: the ETA of a sprint does not change when changing velocity or points. It does change when you navigate to another tab (e.g. wiki) and then go back to the backlogs tab.

And I have a remarks:
- It would be nice that the calculated time using the velocity and story points would be visible for each single issue and this also when you browse the issue (above the Done % bar for example)

Keep up the good work and I hope to see version 0.1 (and 1.0 ;-)) soon!

Hi Felipe and Mano,

Sorry for the late reply. Been very busy at work. On the bright side, we've been using the plugin actively on a daily basis and I now have a good list of things to improve on. :-)

For your problem on not being able to edit, I'm not sure what's causing it other than the possibility that the role assigned to the user may not have the Backlog permission checked. Check this via the Permissions Report page.

Thanks, Mano for the bug report. I'll have that added to the list. Also, the velocity and story points are good ideas too. That will force me to finally familiarize myself with the hooks feature of Redmine. I should have more time to mess around with the plugin in the next couple of weeks. Keep you posted, and thanks for trying out the plugin!

Mark Maglana wrote:

Hi Felipe and Mano,

Sorry for the late reply. Been very busy at work. On the bright side, we've been using the plugin actively on a daily basis and I now have a good list of things to improve on. :-)

For your problem on not being able to edit, I'm not sure what's causing it other than the possibility that the role assigned to the user may not have the Backlog permission checked. Check this via the Permissions Report page.

Thanks, Mano for the bug report. I'll have that added to the list. Also, the velocity and story points are good ideas too. That will force me to finally familiarize myself with the hooks feature of Redmine. I should have more time to mess around with the plugin in the next couple of weeks. Keep you posted, and thanks for trying out the plugin!

hi Mark,

Permission is set to the user. I'm using bitnami redmine version 0.8.5 with MySQL....

Besides the permission, do you have any other suggestion i could try?

thanks!

Hi Felipe,

I'm not sure if this is the culprit, but I have not tried the plugin with 0.8.5 yet. I'll have to check when I have time.

Regards,

Mark

Mark Maglana wrote:

Hi Felipe,

I'm not sure if this is the culprit, but I have not tried the plugin with 0.8.5 yet. I'll have to check when I have time.

Regards,

Mark

Mark,

I now installed plugin using latest trunk, and now it seems that i can edit (move issues to sprints and edit names), but it doesn't seem to be saving my changes (it shows the processing icon and never stops! when i reload the backlogs all my changes are gone.

Any ideas?

Thanks for the support!

Mark Maglana wrote:

but I have not tried the plugin with 0.8.5 yet. I'll have to check when I have time.

This is the result i get when doing the migrate_plugins:

rake aborted!
uninitialized constant Backlogs::IssuePatch

Great job :)

If may I suggest sth, maybe it's a good idea to combine this plugin with this: http://www.redmine.org/issues/443#note-101 Same way of keeping subtasks in database could be helpful :) Subtasks will be visible the same way on backlog page and issue view. Second idea is to add something like `maintracker` from http://www.redmine.org/boards/3/topics/5808 to limit issues listed on Main Backlog list.

Regards

For the issue with not being able to update redmine has changed the method name so it is not any more
User.current.roles_for_project and not is User.current.role_for_project.

So this has to be changed in the redmine_backlogs/app/models/item.rb in 2 locations it is apearing.

BTW great job on this plugin. I hope it was not left alone without anymore development :(

Milos Zikic wrote:

For the issue with not being able to update redmine has changed the method name so it is not any more
User.current.roles_for_project and not is User.current.role_for_project.

So this has to be changed in the redmine_backlogs/app/models/item.rb in 2 locations it is apearing.

BTW great job on this plugin. I hope it was not left alone without anymore development :(

I tried to apply this fix with the latest trunk of redmine....no luck....any ideas?

Heh, well right now looked at the current trunk and with the current trunk it should work as is since there the method is called roles_for_project

source:trunk/app/models/user.rb#L236

I applied this against redmine stable 0.84 built. Since our redmine is running in a production environment I didn't want to go with the latest.

Hi guys,

Thanks for the corrections. I think in those two instances I used User.current.roles_for_project, I wrapped them in an if statement so that it would work in a version older than 0.8.4.

Also, apologies for the lack of updates lately. I've been very busy at work and haven't had time to work on the kinks I want to fix with this plugin. As a consolation, we actually already use the current HEAD internally and I've a handful of fixes and enhancements I can't wait to get done.

As always, if you feel like changing/improving a behavior or event taking this plugin to a totally different direction, feel free to do so by forking on github. :-)

Hi,

First I must say that this looks promising, I have been looking forward to a plugin to track and visualize the scrum backlog.

I am not sure if I understand the intended workflow. I could not find a way to update the estimate of remaining time for a backlog item. If you change the status of an item to closed, it will add to the completed curve in the chart. How can I update the remaining estimate for a given task? If I change the estimate in the backlog view, it updates the scope, which is not what I expected.

Would it be possible to specify the initial estimate and a seperate field for the remaing estimate? Or maybe even better to just link it to the time estimate and progress column of issue?

Hi Magnus,

Thanks for trying out the plugin! The way the current version works reflects how we do scrum internally which is that we don't update the estimate unless we find in the middle of the sprint that our initial estimate was way off. Also, as a product manager, I prefer that my devs report to me that an item is either done, or not done. Anything in between isn't of value to me.

On the other hand, there may be some workflows such as yours that totally validate the need for partial updates to the estimate. Not sure how to do that though without cluttering up the rows. Perhaps by showing that field on clicking "More" ? Feel free to give it a try. I'd be happy to merge that into the trunk if you have a solution.

Hi Mark,

I had a brief look at the code. Now it looks like you store the time estimates in the point field of item. Is there any reason why we cannot reuse the estimated_hours field in issues? To me it would add value to be able to easily go between backlog view and issue view.

One way to to track progress then, would be to generate the total scope daily based on the sum of estimated_hours for all issues assigned to a sprint, and to calculate remaining (or completed) from estimated_hours and the completed percentage for every issue assigned to the sprint. For the user interface, I would then suggest adding a column for inputing the remaining estimate or % done in the backlog view.

If this makes sense for more people than me, I can try to make a patch.

Magnus Nordseth wrote:

If this makes sense for more people than me, I can try to make a patch.

It make sense for me too ;)

BTW is there a chance for a patch to manage subtasks in backlog plugin based on redmine`s issue relations or subtasks? I wrote a note about it here: http://www.redmine.org/boards/3/topics/8339#message-9093

Greets

Sounds good, Magnus. You might want to take the discussion on that feature to the official ticketing site of the plugin: https://backlogsplugin.morphexchange.com/projects/redmine-backlogs :-)

I might have something to contribute in that aspect also. I remember an old old version of this plugin where I had it automatically compute the remaining hours and percent complete when you change the estimate mid-sprint.

Lech R 1, sub-tasks using redmines issue relations is also a desire feature that I file here: https://backlogsplugin.morphexchange.com/issues/140

Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to work on that and other things. Product management tasks are getting in the way of my coding. ;-)

Cheers!

Hi Magnus,

See if this works for what you intend to achieve. This is from an old version of the plugin (it was named Really Big Wall back then) that I never released to the public:

  // ESTIMATE = 0, % DONE = 0
  // - When points are increased, set ESTIMATE to that value
  // - When points are decreased, do not allow to continue
  // 
  // ESTIMATE = +, % DONE = 0
  // - When points are increased, set ESTIMATE to that value
  // - When points are decreased, set % DONE accordingly
  // 
  // ESTIMATE = +, % DONE = +
  // - When points are increased, increase ESTIMATE and adjust % DONE so that ABSOLUTE DONE is fixed
  // - When points are decreased, set % DONE accordingly
  eval_points_left: function(obj) {
    var hash            = $H(obj);
    var new_points_left = hash.unset('points_left');
    var points_left     = this.get_value('points_left');
    var estimated_hours = this.get_value('estimated_hours');
    var done_ratio      = this.get_value('done_ratio');

    if(done_ratio == 0 && new_points_left > points_left) {
      hash.set('estimated_hours', new_points_left);
    } else if(estimated_hours > 0 && new_points_left < points_left) {
      hash.set('done_ratio', (1 - new_points_left/estimated_hours) * 100);
    } else if(estimated_hours > 0 && done_ratio > 0 && new_points_left > points_left) {
      var adjusted_estimate = estimated_hours + (new_points_left - points_left);
      hash.set('estimated_hours', adjusted_estimate);
      hash.set('done_ratio', (1 - new_points_left/adjusted_estimate) * 100);      
    }

    return hash.toObject();
  },

Hi,

I just tried the demo site : https://backlogsdemo.morphexchange.com/projects/demo/backlogs and get an internal error.

I installed the plugin (0.0.1) onto redmine 0.8.4 (MySQL).

First thing was I needed to add RAILS_ENV=production to the rake command line mentioned in your readme.

Then I enabled the backlogs tab on a test project. The first time I selected the tab, I got an internal error. The second time it was ok.

After this, I got stuck. Are there any instructions how to use the backlog page, or how it affects issues when dragged etc.

Assuming it's a supported feature, I couldn't get drag and drop to work. I'm not sure what more / talk / chart buttons do, but when I press them nothing happens. I've enabled backlogs in permissions - is there something else I need to do to allow editing features on the backlog tab ?

Hi Mark,

first of all I would like to tell you that I like your plugin. I had thought of developing something similar...

I have a question about the licence you used. I allways thought -- and, honestly, disliked -- that Redmine plugins have to be under the GPL as Redmine is under GPL, too. You use the MIT licence -- which is much more business friendly from my point of you --. How do these two licences, GPL and MIT, go together?

Cheers
Wieland