RedMine basic principles

Although the POLARIS project language is English, this FAQ, explaining the basic principles of working in RedMine (our ticketing system) is translated into most of the languages of Polaris users.

If the translation in your language does not yet exist, please contact the support team in your country.

What is RedMine?

RedMine is a system, used to track all activities regarding support and development of Polaris and SEMDA. Access to RedMine is granted to all DICOs and their deputies and to the developers of local club management systems using SEMDA. On request, other people, like active CICOs, may get access to RedMine too.

The activities tracked in RedMine are:

Bug - error discovered by the users
Feature - request for new feature or improvement of existing feature
Support - request for help or question that needs clarification
Idea - proposal for major enhancements or significant change which should be discussed in the Assembly.

How is RedMine organized?

RedMine, activities are organized in projects.

Polaris Support (country) => Project used by the DICOs and deputies of one country.

SEMDA Support => Project used by the developers of local club management systems.

The project Release Notes => Project informing about closed tickets and deployed versions. Assembly ideas prepared by the Polaris Team also appear in this project. All RedMine users have access to it.

Polaris / SEMDA Development are the main projects for tracking tickets between the Polaris / SEMDA Team and the Development Team. Only Polaris team members and the developing company have access to it.

RedMine - Flexible Change Request Management

General information flow

All types of tickets are created and managed by the DICOs in the particular Support project. Any new ticket must be assigned to the Polaris Team in order to start its processing.

When watchers are added to the ticket, additional persons are informed about the progress and/or state change of that ticket.

The Polaris Team verifies the request and, if there is a demand for change, will create a new development ticket in the project Polaris Development, linking it to the original ticket.

During the development, the original ticket stays assigned to the Polaris Team, in state "In progress" or "Postponed". This may be for a long time because, at that point, it is unclear when, in which release and if at all, the ticket will be implemented. The state just says that the Polaris team will take care of it.

Reporting to the Polaris Team

When the change is done, tested and deployed into the productive system, the Polaris Team will update the state of the ticket to "Resolved" and assign it back to the author. In this way, the author is notified when the problem has been solved and that it is up to him to test it.

If the ticket is of general interest, when it is solved, the Polaris Team creates a copy in the project Polaris Release Notes. In this way, all RedMine users can see which problems (Bugs) have been solved and which features are deployed in which release.

Feedback to the DICOs

Working with RedMine

The RedMine processes are described in a separate FAQ. Training is required before you start working with RedMine.

RedMine is Open Source and is hosted on an independent infrastructure, controlled by the Polaris Team directly. For support questions regarding RedMine please send e-mail to jan.trnka@rotary.ch