I've been working on standardizing the development work flow at my company (LHI) and a key feature of this was implementing an Issue tracking service. It would have to run on Linux and not use MS technologies like asp. Additional features like project management and SVN integration were also taken in to account. First came the evaluation phase where I went through countless blog posts looking for the perfect match. There were many candidates.
were the main ones. Bugzilla went out the window as soon as I visited there site. My PM has had some bad experiences with Trac so it was out as well. Mantis had the "simple" written all over it and I had doubts whether it would hold up in the long run. But when it came to Redmine, we hit the jackpot.
Aesthetics are important. Some "gurus" might argue that as long as it's functioning looks don't matter. But we're talking about a system which would be used by various people from diverse backgrounds and they should not go "aaaaaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhhhhh" when they log in to the system.
Also it should be easy to use. Redmine had the aesthetics part going for it. It wasn't overflowing with artistic touches but had enough stylistics elements to please the eye. The setup on SuSe 11.1 was reletively painless. I had it up and running in 3 hours and I'm just a developer ;-) So far, my experience with Redmine (which has been limited to setting up a single project, adding users and integrating svn) has been excellent.
I haven't played around with customizations and plugins and am still in the process of migrating the site to Apache2 but I think these things would not be difficult. All in all, Redmine is a gem amongst the free and open source issue tracking software arena.
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