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Contracts Plugin

Added by Shane Pearlman almost 14 years ago

Hi Folks,

As part of our ongoing effort to streamline our business, we are embarking on a new project. This plugin is really a gen2 version of our budget plugin (soon to be retired). Its purpose is to empower a project manager with the tools and real time data needed to measure success and be informed about and react to potential problem sooner.

We are looking for other service related firms that use redmine who might be interested in contributing to development, or helping to fund the project with us. We are already in discussions with a few groups we respect enormously and hopefully by sharing the cost, this can become a reality much sooner than later. We don't have a real cost estimate yet, but I think this will probably come out to be somewhere between 15-30k before it is stable and comprehensive. We will develop in an agile manner, but when working with financial reporting, careful code is key.

After significant debate, Peter, Reid and I concluded that a project manager's core responsibility (in a service business) is to execute the terms of the contract. That means that the project is on budget, on track and on time. If you use the contract as a clear metric, then that is something we can use information from redmine to measure against. Quite often, over the life of a project, it will have multiple contracts, which need to be measured independently. Thus we are proposing a new financial object, called a contract, which is the child of a project. One project, many contracts.

A contract is composed of: Deliverables (scope + budget) and Milestones (time). Deliverables are tied to issues, which when used in conjunction with the rate and overhead plugin, will allow for real time cost reporting. Milestones are simply dates that the project needs to keep track of (budget, versions / releases, billing ...).

I have included comps and a significant scope document for anyone whom might be interested to review and provide feedback.

http://cl.ly/106o


Replies (19)

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Shane Pearlman almost 14 years ago

The following are the two core comps to the app. There are more comps in the zip and other integrations we still need to work out.

For the rest of the comps and the full spec, please download http://cl.ly/106o

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Stefan H Singer almost 14 years ago

This looks very interesting. As it stands today, for us a big issue with totally migrating our project management into redmine is logging time. It's just not simple enough as it stands today, is that somehow also part of the scope for this project?

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Shane Pearlman almost 14 years ago

Hi Stefan,

Thanks for the reply! This plugin will not directly affect the time clocking. We do have another couple of plugins that do impact it though: eric davis' Timesheet plugin, our rate plugin, our overhead plugin. Also there is Squeejee's harvest plugin.

What exactly are the issues you are facing with time clocking. We have over a 100 users, many of them clocking time and do not have too many issues. The biggest problem we have with initial users is the difference between the comment on the time and the notes field, but that is about it.

-S

For updates, release information and tips about our open source plugins or redmine core ux/ui, follow me on twitter @justlikeair.

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Stefan H Singer almost 14 years ago

Well, honestly, most want to be able to choose between if they log time on a project, on an issue or on for instance a milestone / deliverable. And apart from that, the actual time logging is fairly hasslesome compared to for instance slimtimer.com in its "widget" form (just a web page, but still really easy to work with).

I know this is a bit off topic and out of the scope of this project though :)

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Shane Pearlman almost 14 years ago

Ah. In our case we only allow clocking to issues. Random clocking to projects hurts clear accountability. As for milestones (just calendar dates) and deliverables (a collection of issues, therefor clocking goes through issues), we are not allowing clocking to them either.

As for simplicity of timers, I have a feeling a number of choices will rapidly appear as soon as eric finishes the plugin api.

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Stefan H Singer almost 14 years ago

Well, I too think all time should be clocked to issues. Getting everyone else to understand the benefits of accountability is a major problem though :)

For now, I've notified a few others at our company about your project here, and we'll keep trying to find a good way to clock time. We might end up developing our own "widget timer" in the end, we'll see :)

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Shane Pearlman almost 14 years ago

=)

let me know when you timer is completed.

We actually turned off clocking to projects entirely. You can only clock to issues now.

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Przemyslaw Jacko over 13 years ago

We would love to try this plugin as the current one - Budget Plugin - is not enough for our purposes.
Is there any possibility to obtain this plugin?

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Shane Pearlman over 13 years ago

Release 2 has been launched. We have not open sourced it quite yet, but if you ask Eric Davis for it, he can give you a copy.

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Przemyslaw Jacko over 13 years ago

I have no reponse from Eric so far. Is there any chance to upload a plugin or contact with you directly?

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Shane Pearlman over 13 years ago

Eric has been on vacation the last two weeks and is only now just getting back. I'll let him know about the requests.

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Eric Davis over 13 years ago

The latest code is on my Github account. A few disclaimers about it:

  • It is developed specifically for Shane and Peter's Redmine only, so it may or may not be compatible with any other Redmine version.
  • I am not ready to support the Open Source version yet, thus...
  • The documentation may be lacking/wrong.
  • I will not be accepting any bug reports or feature requests at this time.

Once I have been able to do an official Open Source release, I will be opening up the bug tracker for it and will then be able to support community involvement around it. I will be making an official release announcement at that time.

https://github.com/edavis10/redmine_contracts

Eric Davis

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Przemyslaw Jacko over 13 years ago

Thanks Eric for the link. We will try to install it and check it out in our enviroment. I`m fully aware of your restrictions at this point so we will try to fix any bugs on our own.

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Przemyslaw Jacko over 13 years ago

I founde in text and in requirements of plugin, that the Contracts works in conjunction with the rate and overhead plugin. I have the rate plugin (from previous Budget plugin) but I`m lacking overhead one. Where should I look for it? I can`t finish installation of Contract Plugin.

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by snow windwaves about 13 years ago

Has anyone gotten contracts installed? I installed, rate, overhead, budget, lockfile gem, formtastic gem, but rake db:migrate_plugins says it can't find formtastic and I need to rake gems:install but I can't get beyond this point.

I understand it is "as is" for now, but I am curious to see how it could work for me

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Przemyslaw Jacko about 13 years ago

After a few tryies we have gave up. This plugin at this moment is hardly compatible with the present redmine trunk. I also will bee happy to hear if someone succeded.

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Eric Davis about 13 years ago

Przemyslaw Jacko wrote:

After a few tryies we have gave up. This plugin at this moment is hardly compatible with the present redmine trunk. I also will bee happy to hear if someone succeded.

It is compatible, I'm running it on two sites: Shane Pearlman's and my own. Once it's officially open sourced I'll create some documentation for it and start supporting it. Until then, it's just some pretty code to look at. :)

Eric Davis

RE: Contracts Plugin - Added by Andrey Korolyov about 13 years ago

I want to test that plugin. But cant install it properly.
Dependencies is:

Redmine 1.0.5
redmine_rate
redmine_overhead
redmine_budget (redmine overhead does not work without redmine_budget)

What i miss ?

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