trac vs. redmine: no release creates danger of life

not so long ago trac with its very active plugin develepment on trac-hacks seemed to be the clear leader to support corporate and opensource software development projects.

trac itself always had a quite long release cycle, but this was compensated by a continuous stream of plugin releases. but currently the project seems to fail in some key areas:

• lots of plugins need to be installed which is not particularly appreciated by corporate system administrators.
  
• not doing the next release: it gets postponed without really finding additional users and people who could fix a bug.
• having kind of a deadlock in the three important areas of "multi-project management", "ticket dependencies" and "time tracking".

plugins like oforge try to assemble multiple plugins to make it easier to set up and find usable plugins out of the hundreds of available ones.

especially multi project management, dependencies, and time tracking are the key features of the newsly emerging tracker redmine. also a trac importer helps with the migration away from trac.

for java oriented corporations a java based deployment is also important, which arun gupta did with redmine on glassfish.

offshoring stabilities and instabilities ...

the main reason for offshoring seems to be (1) more return for the money and (2) an endless reservoir of skilled developers. seeting up an offshore partnership involves:

• decide what to offshore, and depending on that,
  
• choose a process for creating and signing off deliveries
  
• choose technologies used to cooperate
• and finally, contractual details in case of non-delivery (time, quality).
  

this applies for partnering with a typical offshore company as well as for setting up a branch in an offshore country.

a few obstacles need to be considered:

• people might move on to their next career step within 9 months.
• this may pose special pressure on efficient knowledge transfer, and, in addition with
  
• beeing remote, pose challenges in team-building,
• and, mainly from a legal-, data- and knowledge protection pov, access rights and cooperation zones need special attention.
  

In the next weeks we will elaborate these topics a little bit.