Top 5 benefits of using Redmine at the software development team

Productivity is the utmost goal among software development teams. Every manager wants to make the best use of their people’s time. How to achieve this? Here’s your guide on how to use Redmine to deliver software faster.

Good leaders have to be able to schedule the project in the right way, make sure the workload is balanced, and every minute is recorded. They have to make sure all bugs and requests changes are recorded and connected with the code their team is building.

Last but not least, they have to listen to what clients are saying by staying in the loop with the customer support team and keep track of billings. Yet often these steps are implemented, but teams still struggle to cover and synchronise the actions, because of wrong selection of tools or lack of thereof.

The solution is simple — to select a tool able to cover all the points above, such as open-sourced issue tracker Redmine. It has all the features developers need: issue and time tracking, wiki, forums. It’s also highly configurable and can be extended with multiple plugins.

At first glance, it looks ugly and outdated, like an old car. But don’t let the default interface scare you. You can apply one of many popular Redmine themes (free and commercially available) and get an interface that Jira wouldn’t be ashamed of.

In the moto-sphere, it reminds of a legendary Mercedes W123: — car that was so good it almost brought Mercedes to the edge of bankruptcy (because no-one needed to service it!).

But compare it with modern vehicles that look way fancier, and you’ll notice that they break more often and are way costlier to maintain. If you follow our guide, you get the same Mercedish-high-quality tool that you won’t need to service at all.

To use Redmine, you have to install it on your server or choose a hosted version. There are multiple hosting providers that offer a Redmine installer, but such an option is troublesome in maintaining and updating. We provide fully serviced and fully features ready to use Redmine with the most popular commercial plugins.

1. Upgrade Redmine into Agile project management tool

The first step is not as much about software as about the mindset and approach to the project. It might seem as relatively the most time-consuming, but it will bring you the most tangible results. Why change the ineffective old-school project management style to an agile one?

Because it enables us to deliver software projects that are closer to the client’s objectives, faster and with better communication than in waterfall. To learn more about the waterfall and agile project management differences, check out our previous post.

Being Agile is essential in today’s business when even the most prominent players, such as Accenture, have problems delivering on promises made in IT projects.

By dividing the project into smaller deliverable chunks, you will be able to provide a final product with more transparency and faster time to market.

What’s the real use of this? It’s easier to process and track the progress of tasks that forms the software. By placing them on the Agile board, it’s immediately visible what has to be done, when, and by whom. You can adjust the board to any methodology — Scrum, Kanban, or mixed.

You can create a custom board for each role in the project with different level of details. Using drag and drop makes it easy to assign a task to team members and move between statuses.

Board enables us to see progress on task realization, add comments, update statuses. In addition to the agile board, you can use a sprint planner, to divide the tasks into Sprints or versions. And once you start working on the project, you can use one of many Agile charts to track the progress of the work.

Teams that work on incoming tasks, such as customer support teams or marketing, can also become more Agile. By applying rules from Kanban methodology, they’ll be able to focus on current tasks and protect themselves from being drowned in assignments.

There’s plenty of materials available that will explain the differences between each methodology– whether to follow SCRUM, Kanban, LEAN, or other — it must be your weapon of choice. Try each for a month and compare the results.

You will find the remaining 4 main benefits described on our Redmine blog:

2. How to report time scrupulously and manage resource scheduling

3. How to Integrate Redmine with code repository

4. How to add and automate the helpdesk in Redmine?

5. How to prepare estimates, and bill spent time as invoices?

6 (Bonus). How to optimize your admin and DevOps resources?

Follow the main article to be able to better ship your software projects with Redmine.