"You can’t keep it all in your head...
... Project control tools are an absolute necessity for the control of large projects." (c) Louis Fried 1992
In the past 20 years something has really changed. Today tools get more and more important and there are also quite a lot of them. ARKA uses Redmine. The tool is an open source project (an unquestionable advantage), so we can easily adjust it to our needs. The software runs on ARKA's own server and is constantly being used by us and our customers. Thus, both information and communication flows become more efficient. On the following pages we will present you the most important advantages of our Redmine online application.
"It’s not enough to be busy ...
... The question is, what are we busy about?" (c) Henry David Thoreau
Before one of our developers starts to work on your project, he or she logs in the Redmine with his or her personal username, finds a task with the highest priority and clicks the “Start” button near the chosen task. After the work is done (or the programmer makes a break or switches to another task with higher priority), he or she clicks the "Stop" button and posts a message, what he or she has done during this period.
You log in with your personal username and have the access to different time records. In the example below you can see a time record for the "Invebstor" project of three selected developers for this week. The results are sorted by developers.
In this record you can see the entire time tracking for the “Invebstor” project for this month. You can also sort the results by task. Now you can see how much time has been spent on this project in total, what tasks took more time and why. If some ambiguities arise, of course, they will be particularly discussed.
The keystone of our project management system is task or rather issue. Each issue has several features, such as:
With pre-defined "queries" you can assign any issue. This is an example of possible view. You can see all the tasks of all projects. They are sorted by "work names" — who is currently working on what task. The following chart information is also specifically chosen.
Status section is also rather interesting. In the admin area you can define the status and permissions. Permissions specify who (customer, manager, developer, etc.) can change which status to which another one. So the whole workflow is defined. For example, only developer can switch the "In process" status to "Ready for development". When the task is finished, he or she switches the status to "Ready for testing". Next, the status is set to "Testing" by a quality assurance specialist, the task is being tested and after that its status is changed either to "Tested" or to "Bugs found". In this example, all the work flows can be defined. The developers have their own queries, where they are looking for "Ready for development" tasks which are assigned to them and sorted by priority.
Here you can see the “#14” task with all associated information in chronological sequence. You can also see time investment and how it was partitioned. This task was divided into smaller tasks (sub issues) and assigned to different developers.
For any documentation and knowledge sharing, there are also plenty of different tools. Whether you want to use wiki, forum, or blog-driven news system, everything is represented in Redmine.
In wiki every article’s version is stored, so you can always follow when, by whom and what was written in it. Screenshots (and everything else what is possible with HTML and CSS), of course, can be also used.
News are always shown at the beginning. No one will miss it. Comments can be left as well.