Do not touch the hardware or Redmine vs. Youtrack

Why change what works? Indeed, the saying goes: "Do not touch the materiel and she will not let you down." “We have a Redmine and we use it. So why do we need to change it to YouTrack, and even for money? ”Is a reasonable question asked by colleagues. The question is known and the answer to it is obvious: there is no need. But let's look at the problem from the other side.

Do we make good use of our existing tracker?

1. How many entries in our tracker have an “empty” in content or in the sense of a comment on the state transition to “fixed”?
   If the honest answer is: almost everything, the tracker is not used as a storage device for information about changes in the product, but only as a fixator of the fact of work performance. Familiar?
2. How often do we open entries in the tracker to add a comment on the changes that have made?
   Does every day? Maybe once a week before sending a weekly report. Why do we duplicate the weekly report?
3. How often do we start work on a bug or feature with the translation of the problem state in the tracker into “in-progress”? Maybe at the end, when everything is done right away in fixed?
4. How often do we generally perform tasks according to priorities?

If at least one question made you think, then for you the tracker is not an assistant, but a time eater. And this is a problem with which to fight.

I was lucky to work in a project with a 10-year history, in which the tracker was a natural place for the exchange of information between 500 developers. They shoved everything there: patches, postal threads with discussions. Having discovered this or that problem, it was very convenient to rummage through history, to see what changes were made and who of the developers participated in it. I must say that the number of records there was close to 70,000. In this project, a very cruel messaging procedure was introduced. If the young "eagle" tried to force things, avoiding writing to the tracker, then the old and sophisticated experience upset him into place. The tracker, by the way, was not fast, and the recording of the comment took about 5 minutes. During this time, it was possible to rethink the situation and not tear the developer away with a trivial problem. But the need to record information in this tracker always caused negative emotions. And only the inevitability of punishment from elders and the understanding of the importance of following the process in such a large project made it necessary to open the tracker every time, wait until the java-machine starts up and make changes to the record.
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Why we, developers, do not want to work through the tracker? Because we think this is a waste of time. It is necessary to open, find, press 5 buttons and, most importantly, formulate a meaningful proposal for what has been done. This is especially hard on Friday night, when you are already going to go home.

Another thing, if the tracker is quite convenient, which makes it easy and intuitive to record information about the work done, prioritization and search. Here it is already possible to give in to the pressure of managers and the product owner, and to spend one minute of your precious time updating the tracker entries. Again, copy-paste to the weekly report becomes quite a simple matter.

What is the convenience of use? Comparing Redmine and YouTrack, I come to the conclusion that YouTrack for me there are three killer features that make chatting with this tracker enjoyable and convenient:

1. Editing entries on one screen without pressing additional keys. Do not scroll the screen. The main controls are always in one place. In Redmine, after pressing the Update key, your screen will go up and the location of the fields for editing will differ from their location in the view mode.
2. Arbitrary sorting of records. Entries can be dragged higher or lower, thereby controlling the order of their execution. What exactly is missing in Redmine. Sorting using the Priority field with 5 options is not informative, if the number of entries is more than 100.
3. Deploy and maintain the system. One jar in Youtrack and a directory with all the information. Redmine is also easy, as long as you do not use plugins. Once you have installed one or another plugin, the update becomes a very difficult procedure for undermining files, especially if the author of the plugin does not already support it.

Well, for a sweet, flexible system of filters and a command line that allows you to perform operations without using a mouse, which for true programmers is just like a balm for the soul.

I have not said about Agile Boards, which YouTrack has. However, the desire to satisfy two development models (Scrum and Lean) through one interface is somewhat confusing.

It is clear that Redmine has a system of plugins, through which the programmer can add the functionality that he needs. But writing and maintaining a plugin in working order will cost much more than the money YouTrack costs.

However, this is my personal opinion.