Question

I’ve been using Redmine for almost a year to manage my startup. I have all issues stored in one project with two subprojects for areas that I had to outsource and didn’t want to give the contractor access to the main project issues. My problem is that I have ended up with hundreds of issues which all vary greatly in the time required to implement them. Some are small e.g.’Fix bug in controller’, ‘Add telephone number to contact us page’ etc and some require much more effort e.g. ‘Create a new Q&A area’, ‘Migrate server to nginx’, and some are more abstract e.g. ‘Investigate new SEO opportunities’, ‘Consider implementing a reseller control panel’ etc.

I feel like I must be using Redmine incorrectly as having these all mixed together is a bit confusing. Any ideas on how I could better organize would be greatly appreciated. If supplementing with other tools might be a better idea I’d love to hear suggestions.

Answer 1

I don’t think there is a problem having all the issues you mentioned mixed together in a project as long as they’re all related to the project.

The most important point when using redmine with projects having lots of issues is to make use of custom queries. This is a great feature, but in order to ba able to use it, you must also use and fill in other fields:

• Tracker: Make use of different trackers (the default of bugs, features and tasks works for me)
• Category: Can be a specific part of your software, or other aspects of your business (administration, IT/server, …)
• Version: Use the version to group different issues, usually used for a release, but can also be ideas or unplanned
• Of course priority and Due Date – I often use them for ordering, but you may create a custom query of issues du in the next 2 weeks
• Assignee is usually the most important if there is more than one user – first of all you’ll want to see the issues assigned to you, as well as the issues created by you (in order to follow-up)
• You can always add custom fields in case you have other information which may be used to filter your issues.

Once a set of custom queries are in place, you’ll hardly consult all your open issues at once anymore.