[olpc-nz] Testing for OLPC Australia

Sridhar Dhanapalan sridhar at laptop.org.au
Thu Dec 16 07:04:21 EST 2010


On 16 December 2010 21:08, Mikus Grinbergs <mikus at bga.com> wrote:
>> Anyone in NZ want to put their two cents into this conversation about
>> Sridhar's offer to use the Australian tracking system for our testing?
>
> If you look at the Australian tracking website, it looks outstanding
> regarding the scheduling/tracking/reporting of the actions taken to
> resolve each "issue".  I presume the focus is on "putting to rest" the
> issues that have been entered.

Yes, it would be nice to fix existing issues and not just collect new
ones. Our system is still very new and not entirely populated. Most
notably, the wiki is sparse on documentation. Right now I'm the
primary active user. I hope that changes as we scale to become a more
sustainable community.

> As far as working with the description (plus supplementary material) and
> result of each test, I myself am more familiar with the trak system on
> dev.laptop.org.

Trac is one of the systems I evaluated before selecting Redmine. The
impression I get is that Trac was selected by OLPC and Sugar Labs
because it was the best choice at the time. I would argue that Redmine
is now ahead.

The main reasons for employing Redmine are:

  * it supports multiple projects and subprojects (trac only allows
one project per instance)
  * the setup of permissions, trackers, statuses, categories, etc. is fantastic
  * it's similar to trac, so hopefully it won't feel too foreign for
those already collaborating with OLPC or Sugar Labs
  * redmine has a more active development community than trac (I've
been told that trac is quite stagnant)
  * it seems to be nicer to use than trac (at least in my opinion)
  * the wiki is pretty good, and is integrated well into the issues
tracking (documentation is important!)
  * the version management is awesome
  * I find it useful for charting, reporting, etc.

Trac does a lot of the above, but Redmine just seems to be nicer about it.

I also looked at the combination of JIRA and Confluence (Atlassian
gave us free licences), but they are not open source and looked overly
complex to manage and use. Redmine is a delight to manage.

I'd be happy to discuss ways to make our system better. I'd be even
happier if you can help us to make it happen.


Sridhar


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