Redmine is a Web-based project management tool. Although it can be used for the management of general projects it is specially suited for the management of software projects.

Most Redmine's functionality is provided by modules that you can enable/disable as needed on a per project basis. You can even temporarily disable a module and later reenable it, without loss of the data that module kept for your project.

In LCOM you are required to use the following two Redmine modules:

Repository

This is the main functionality we are interested in. In FEUP, by enabling this module you link your project to a Subversion (SVN) repository, which can be used to keep track of your source code. We will introduce the capabilities of SVN in a later lab, for now it suffices to say that it enables you to keep several versions of your source code, so that you can easily try new ideas and undo them if they do not work as expected.

Documents

This is a module that allows to manage a project documentation. You will have to use it for the documentation (Proposal, Specification and Final Report) of your final integration project.

As for the other modules, e.g. Issues or Wiki, you are not required to use them, but we recommend that you take advantage of this opportunity to explore the capabilities of a Project Management Tool. Please check the 3rd YouTube video listed in Section 2 for an overview of the use of some of those modules in the management of SW projects.

3.0 Logging-In in Linux

All lab classes of this course will take place in the PC-labs of the B-building. The development environment for LCOM is installed on Linux. Therefore, all handouts will assume that you are using Linux. Although you can setup a similar environment on Windows, you'll be mostly on your own.

So, boot your PC in Linux, and then login using your FEUP's account and respective password. Once logged in, you can fire-up a web-browser and point it to https://redmine.fe.up.pt/.

In order to use Redmine in FEUP, you must register first. This is done automatically when you log in for the first time in https://redmine.fe.up.pt/, by clicking on the Sign in option on the top right of Redmine's homepage at FEUP and entering your FEUP's credentials (username and password).

If the login is successful, and you have not registered on Redmine yet, the web browser will show a form that you will need to fill in with your personal data, in particular your given name, your family name(s) and email address. The names you provide are essential as they are used for adding members to a project, as described below.

Throughout this semester each group will use a single Redmine Project. This Project will be used not only for the final integration project but also for each of the lab classes. Thus, your next task is to create a Redmine project for your group.

Note: There must be only one Redmine project per group. Therefore only one group member needs to follow the remaining instructions in this Section.

IMPORTANT Please follow the instructions in this section very carefully. This is very important to ensure that we will find your submissions where we expect them to be. If not, we will not be able to grade them and therefore you will get no credit for your work. This may look too harsh, but we estimate that there will be almost 100 groups in the course and if each group decided to place its submission where it pleased it, we would waste a lot of time just to get a copy of your submitted work. We need you to help us make a productive use of our time; you will also benefit from it. Thanks.

In order to create your group's project, once you are logged in FEUP's Remine, select the Projects option at the top left of the Web page.

Once on the Projects-page, select the New project link on the top right of the white region of the page.

This will show the New Project form:

Name

This is the name of your project. For the sake of uniformity your project's name must be LCOM1718-T<n>G<xy> where

<n>

is the section number (número da turma), only one digit

<xy>

is a two digit group number, e.g. 01 or 10. (This may look picky, but by using a two digit group number we can more easily sort the groups by their number.) The number of your group will be assigned to you by the instructor of your session at the beginning of the class.

Identifier

This is an internal identifier that is also used in the URL of the SVN repository. For the sake of uniformity, this must be identical to the project name, but in lower case. E.g. if the name of assigned to your group is LCOM1718-T1G03, then the identifier must be lcom1718-t1g03.
IMP. the project identifier is unique and it cannot be modified after the project has been created. Be extra careful when entering this field, and double check that you are following the rules stated here. This is because a project's identifier is used in the URL identifier of the associated SVN repository, and we need these identifiers to follow strict rules to easily automate many administrative tasks.

Please leave the Public box unchecked: this ensures that only project members have access to your project. This is important to prevent other students to take unfair advantage of your hard work. It is your responsibility to prevent this from happening, and we may penalize your grade if another group submits code very similar to yours.

Furthermore you must select the Repository module, by checking the respective box. This is critical so that the SVN repository is automatically created and linked to your project.

To avoid mistakes, I suggest that you leave the other boxes with their default values. As already mentioned, you can enable/disable them later, if you wish.

You can now click on the "Create" button, to create your Redmine project. The project will be created immediately, but the creation of the SVN repository may take a few minutes as it is done by a script that is run periodically in the background. In any case, you won't need to use the repository until the last part of this lab. So you need not wait: you can check if the repository was correctly created after the next task, i.e. adding the project members.

3.3 Adding Project Members

Whoever created the Redmine project will be automatically added as a project member in the role of Manager. If you are the manager, you should now add the other project members, and specify their roles.

The role of a member is used for access control and determines which operations the group member may perform. Redmine supports 3 roles, whose main capabilities of interest are as shown in the following table:

A project member may have more than one role.

Your project will have mainly two types of members:

Group members

These are the members of your LCOM group. You can assign all the group members the Manager and Developer roles.

Course instructors

These are all course instructors, not only the instructor of your class section, as we will distribute the grading tasks among us. Therefore, we all must have read access to your project, and thus you must assign all of us the Reporter role.

In order to add members to the group you have to select the Settings tab of your newly created project. It looks like this:

Inside that tab you need to select the Members tab, which will bring a page like the following:

At this point you should add one member at a time. In order to select a member you should enter the email address that member provided when (s)he registered on Redmine (see Section 3.1). This way, you should get a sufficiently short list to scan. Once you have found the desired user, check the corresponding box and select her/his roles by checking the appropriate boxe(s). (You must specify at least one role. Failing to do that, may block further access to Redmine in the same browser session.) Finally, you must click on the Add button to add that user as a member with the chosen role(s).

The name of the instructors of the course and the email address with which they have registered on Redmine are as follows:

• José Pinto(zepinto@fe.up.pt)
• Luís Pinto(dee11013@fe.up.pt)
• Mário Cordeiro(pro11001@fe.up.pt)
• Nuno Paulino (dee11006@fe.up.pt)
• Pedro Silva (pmms@fe.up.pt)
• Pedro Ferreira do Souto (pfs@fe.up.pt)

3.4 Checking the SVN Repository

Adding the group members should have taken more than enough time for the SVN repository to be created. Therefore, you can check now if everything is working as expected. To do that select the Settings option of your project again.

Inside that tab you need to select the Repositories tab, which will bring a page like the following:

That is, your project should have a Subversion repository configured with the following URL: https://svn.fe.up.pt/repos/lcom1718-t<n>g<xy>, where the last component lcom1718-t<n>g<xy> is the identifier you should have given to your project.

If you find no Repositories tab, and you created your project more than 15 minutes ago, go to the Modules tab of the Settings tab of the project to check if the Repository module has been selected. If not, check it again, and check if the repository was created a few minutes later.

If after several attempts, the Repositories tab has not been created, you may have to visit CICA's helpdesk so that they fix the problem for you.

If you find a Repositories tab, but the URL is not as specified, check the identifier you have chosen for your project. If it is not as specified above, you made a mistake in the input of the project identifier. Please follow the instructions in Appendix 2 to fix this.

You should also check the name of your project. If it is not as specified above, please follow the instructions in Appendix 3 to correct the name of your project.