While working on one of my current projects I came to realize the importance of good task management and issue tracking. Sadly the use of an expensive Team Foundation Server does not guarantee good task tracking when the tasks are only used to do the rough planning in MS Project. Much more important than the tool being used, is to use any tool in a good and efficient way. Even for projects with one single developer, using task management helps to keep track of the progress and to work and focus on subtasks.

Redmine

There are a lot of issue tracking and project management tools out there. I’ve been using trac for quite some time in different projects but then I have been looking for a tool that does the same stuff but allows to manage multiple projects within one instance. After installing Redmine the search was over 😉 Redmine comes with a big feature list and in addition there are some handy plugins, most mentionable the Stuff-To-Do plugin.

To enable synchonization between Eclipse Mylyn and Redmine, the Mylyn Connector plugin needs to be installed in Redmine. To do that, simply cd to your Redmine root dir and run

ruby script/plugin install git://redmin-mylyncon.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/redmin-mylyncon/redmine-mylyn-connector

Depending on your type of installation, a webserver restart may be required. In addition to the plugin, also make shure that “Enable REST web service” is activated in the Redmine Authentication Settings.

Eclipse & Mylyn

Two Features need to be installed in Eclipse in Order to use the Redmine task integration: Mylyn and the Redmine Mylyn Connector. These Features can simply be installed using these Update Sites:

Mylyn: http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/helios

Redmine Mylyn Connector: http://redmin-mylyncon.sourceforge.net/update-site/N/

After installing these Features, open the “Task Repositories” view and add a Task Repository with these self-explanatory settings:

When the settings have been successfully validated and the new task repository has been created, a new dialog is presented to create the first query for the task repository. The task list can be filtered by every available field of the Redmine task repository. As a result of the query the Task List view gets populated with the task items of your Redmine instance.

The combination of the Eclipse Mylyn and Redmine also provides a bunch of additional features such as time-tracking of individual work items, to filter displayed items by the active working set linked with the selected task and a whole lot more…

And always remember: The most important point is to use project and task tracking in the first place 🙂