Is that process/workflow/criteria at least
written down somewhere so
someone could start hunting for a replacement without needing too much
help from the team?
Yes, we have a slide deck that talks about it. We could move it on-wiki if
anyone's interested. Here's a rough high level description:
Epics are high level things that our stakeholders would like us to focus
on. By stakeholders we mean the community, people in WMF, etc.
Every quarter, we prioritize the Epics that we'll focus on.
We break down prioritized Epics into Features and gather medium-level
requirements there.
We then decide to do Features as part of Sprints (two week work periods).
When we do that, we break down the features into Tasks.
Features, tasks, and epics have statuses that they move through according
to a few simple rules. Features are estimated in points and that's how we
figure out what we can do in a given period of time.
This is pretty standard for agile, and most freemium and for-pay tools let
you implement this process. But, out-of-the-box, Redmine, Trac, Bugzilla,
etc. are not easy to beat into submission.
Personally, I'd love to move to something like github + gitban or
Phabricator. I value user experience over the hacker ethics but Mingle
kind of fails me on both :) However, we've invested a lot into our process
and there were some very good reasons for that. So, for now, I think we
have bigger and simpler fish to fry.
Hope that helps, but feel free to ask anything if you're interested.