Redmine

Hi,

First please visit this page (it is a Redmine, and you are welcome to click the diagrams) or this (you are also welcome to download a report using "Descargar informe" button).

My name is Txinto Vaz. I'm software and systems engineer and I have worked in automotive and astrophisics instrumentation amongs others.
From 2008 approx I've been using Redmine in all projects where possible. Not only as a project management tool. I've used it also as a super-powerful backend for modeling systems. Thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks to you all for supporting this incredible and stable project.

I'm not a rails developers but I've coded rails over years, first with the fantastic Hobo on Rails but when it closed I started to use Redmine as an stable base for building web applications. Over the years I developed a lot of "proof of concepts".

Probably the most important one is cosmoSys-Req, which is a truly open source and free requirements management tool, totally based in Redmine. It is very graphical and scales very well (thanks to the project tree structure of Redmine). This tool is based on cosmoSys which is like an enhancement of Redmine o accomodate the features I think Redmine needs to be the tool in my dreams. Diagrams, trees, attractive reports, etc.

This tool is used by the European Solar Telescope, the LIOM project, Wooptix, the New Robotic Telescope among others. I am currently working to stablish cosmoSys-Req as the default requirements database tool for some public institutions. As cosmoSys is based in Redmine, this means that Redmine will be available to these people to manage their projects.

During last months I've been refactoring the project to don't use custom-fields, etc. The solution is consistent and works sufficiently well. I am writing this loong post because:

• Firstable, let you know about the existence of the project obtaining, if possible, good advices from you.
• I am in the process of researching for complementary plugins which improve the user experience of the Redmine instances running cosmoSys.

Take into account that if we are lucky Redmine can step into the requirements management tool world, and then any startup or public institution which can not afford paying expensive licenses to manage requirements may want to install a Redmine with plugins, or probably will ask for external companies to host Redmine instances.

Finally, I am not at your same level of knowledge or skills in Ruby, Rails or Redmine. My work is probably far from perfect. I have good collaborators which do their best, but our community has already important users but small support.

In my dreams, the best future I can imagine is Redmine (or other open-source plugins) incorporating many features like the ones in cosmoSys so we can not have to support so many features.

If you are a plugin developer and identify something your plugin is already solving, or something tour plugin can contribute to give to the community high quality and free systems engineering tools, just send me a message or answer this post.

Thanks again. Some other day I'll talk you about this too.