Redmine

Just in case you are looking to (a) polish your Ruby/Redmine skills and (b) help the Redmine community greatly, all at the same time, here's an idea. Having spent quite some time researching the topic, I think I can confidently say that one of the important things that Redmine currently lacks is SLA support; basically, an ability to measure things like response time and resolution time for an issue, that would allow Redmine to be used as a great help desk tool as well. Interestingly enough, there seems to be no support for such obvious and (supposedly) quite simple functionality - neither in Redmine itself, nor in the plugins.

So if you are looking for a little Ruby practice that would make many people happy - why not write a plugin that would:

• Add an extra column to issues DB table and store response time in it. Basically, a number of seconds between the point in time when an issue is created (issues.created_on), and the point in time when this issue transfers to any other state.
• Add an extra column to issues DB table and store resolution time in it. Basically, a number of seconds between the point in time when an issue is created (issues.created_on), and the point in time when this issue enters any of the terminal/final states (such as Closed or Rejected, if we are looking at the default set).
• Make it possible to select and see these two fields in issue reports. Ideally, in both formats: (1) as "86509 seconds" (for further export to CSV and calculations elswhere) and (2) as "2 days 45 minutes 3 seconds" (for convenient viewing in Redmine).
• Make it possible to use those two fields in filters for issue reports - so that it would be possible to see all issues with response time greater than 1 day, for example.

That's it. Already these little things, which seem quite easy to implement as a plugin, would be very, very beneficial.

Thanks in advance to anyone, who would be brave enough to undertake this endeavor :)