Redmine for Agile project management

Over the last few years I have implemented various tools in the search for the perfect project management approach for software development. I have used dotProject (www.dotproject.net), M$ Projects, OTRS (otrs.org), and Jira (www.atlassian.org), and all of them had their ups and downs. Although Jira gave me the closest match to what I needed, I kept going back to google to find a similar open source tool that could equal Jira. I needed multiple projects, with scrum-style development iterations, and close integration to subversion.

A few months ago, I struck gold. One of our partners was using Redmine (www.redmine.org),  and I had the opportunity to play around with it while we were doing joint development. A slightly complicated install due to its dependency on Ruby and Rails, but a few hours and I was up and running.

The out-of-the-box install and setup seemed like it was more geared towards multiple, long term projects, but with a bit of playing and tweaking I was able to set up a structure that makes a lot of sense for projects that follow the Scrum/Agile development approach. I ended up with a root "Development" project, connected to our root SVN repository, one sub-project for a backlog of unscheduled tasks, and multiple iteration-type sub-projects that allow for the planning of two-weekly iterations of development. It has an excellent batch-update functionality, and the ability to customize task statuses and work flow was a major selling point.

I have now converted all of our projects to running on Redmine, and I have for the first time in years stopped searching.