Subtasks: Dumping FogBugz for Redmine

As you'll note in an earlier post, my wife and I had been using FogBugz for issue tracking – but I was dissatisfied with it. As I remarked in that post, the installation instructions and general support for any server platform other than Windows are mediocre. And in version 6 (which we were running), the wiki didn't support Safari.

But what was really annoying was that FogBugz 6 didn't support subtasks.

I personally find subtasks incredibly useful for organizing work! I like to take a big task – such as a major feature that may take a week or two – and break it down into sub-tasks, and sub-sub-tasks, and so on, to a level of granularity where each bottom-level task is clear and easy to complete in a few hours or less. Then I can just do them, and tick them off, and when all the lower-level tasks are done, the top-level task is done.

So when I upgraded our version-control and issue tracking server to Ubuntu Lucid, I thought, "I can get subtasks by upgrading FogBugz to version 7. Or I can look around and see if there are any alternatives."

But when I started looking around, I was amazed to see that, despite how many requests you'll see for subtask support, few issue tracking systems do it well! Trac doesn't do it at all. And as I found out when working at Kno, Jira only offers one level of subtasks – which isn't enough for me as a lone developer, let alone for what we were trying to do at Kno.

It was particularly astonishing to me because subtasks are a tree, and for a competent computer scientist, trees should be trivial. All I can figure is that the people who originally designed these systems didn't even consider the need for hierarchy, and then found that extending it was difficult. And even that I find odd, because most of them are based on relational databases, and adding a "parent task" column to the "task" table shouldn't be hard. So they must have put some unusual roadblocks in their own way.

And then, like the sun rising after a storm, I found... Redmine. It's open-source (e.g. free as in beer). It has unlimited levels of sub-tasks. It has custom fields. It has a wiki that works with every browser I've tried it with. It has forums. It's easier to install on Ubuntu than FogBugz – even from source (which I did). I just love it.

Well, except that (as of Oct. 1o, 2010) its documentation is very incomplete, and some operations can only be done in a clunky way. But at least you can do them! And I'll explain one thing I figured out how to do in the next post.