Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 128 posts

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#111

Post by LaundroMat »

Just a side note, but one way of sifting through the features commenters have been suggesting and prioritizing them should you be wanting to create a product out of this is the Kano model. (I'm not affiliated, but here's a great guide to the model: https://foldingburritos.com/kano-model/)

I just wanted to share this because I've only discovered it recently (although it's been around quite some time already) and because it's been very helpful to me. I did a quick write-up of one project on Medium: https://medium.com/@monsieurthieu/before-spending-any-money-...)

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#112

Post by mdaniel »

laurynas-s wrote: post #105

Moved away from Jira to GitLab and it is almost perfect. Some features are missing, but I hope the GitLab team will add sooner or later. In Jira, there was too much customisation which made it difficult to configure properly and as many times I tried to come up with perfect workflow, I have failed to do.

For my curiosity, do you have one issue repo, or are the issues split up by repo?

We have the latter, and it's monster annoying to try and discover in which repo folks filed tickets, because there's nothing in GitLab that validates the ticket belongs in the repo.

Given a magic wand, I would actually just switch off the issue tracker for every repo we have, and create `the-org/issues` or maybe even `the-org/the-org` so I can have `the-org/the-org/wiki` and `the-org/the-org/issues`

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#113

Post by noir_lord »

alangibson wrote: post #13
noir_lord wrote: post #7

Pure API with a trello like level of attention to the API (there API is fabulous). Give devs the primitives to build their own without starting from scratch, my problem (me as sole programmer supporting software that 70 people use) is not the same as yours.

I like the idea of letting people roll their own with a set of primitives, but I'm not convinced that people really want that when it gets down to it. Devs like the freedom to change their tools, but wouldn't most rather be getting real work done than iterating on their issue tracker?

I don't know, I've not seen it tried.

However of the bug trackers I've used they all make it hard to set up custom workflows because the UI is a poor 'DSL'.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#114

Post by matfil »

alangibson wrote: post #34
simplecomplex wrote: post #23

It would look like: My manager emails me something to do. I respond to that email to update them. I can easily search, tag, star, and export/backup our “tasks”. It loads instantly, and everybody has access to email everywhere they go, on any device. There’s an archive of communication, it supports attachments, multiple languages, and screen readers. It also has the best uptime. So my ideal issue tracker is email. I h…

Email is a nearly ideal version of a surprising number of things. The only places it really falls apart is with hierarchy (i.e. epics which contain issues which contain tasks) and in generating reports.

I'd argue that "generating reports" is quite possibly an anti-feature in an issue tracker. It's a strong indication that whoever is building this thing is on the side of the managers, not the doers.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#115

Post by matfil »

Titles, optional brief descriptions, and an absolute minimum of other stuff. Not lots of structured fields. Definitely not custom states and flow-charts. If there's extensively discussion to be had, put that elsewhere. Ideally, e-mail.

I just want a TODO list to glance over occasionally, not a system that can turn into full-time job in its own right.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#116

Post by explainplease »

ludwigvan wrote: post #84
PaulHoule wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I thought Stack Overflow was a spam site. Frequently I have to barge through ten screenfuls of code that don't work before I finally get to a correct answer. To add insult to injury SO doesn't allow questions about many important topics such as "how do I eliminate the wheat from the chaff for all the libraries I could possibly use to do this?" It might be 2035 when they finally add parenthesis to all the Pytho…

Well, the idea that most people forgot or didn't realize (including me) is actually StackOverflow is a wiki so you can edit and fix other people's answers. You might need some reputations points before you can do that though. The idea was to get the definitive answer as in Wikipedia. It was a good time when SO came out, afterwards it degraded in quality like anything else in universe.

> StackOverflow is a wiki so you can edit and fix other people's answers.

    Your edit was rejected because:

    [x] It deviates from the original intent of the post
    [x] It doesn't preserve the goals of the post's owner
That's what I got for updating an answer that was 3 years out-of-date. I had to post mine as a separate answer. That was 3 years ago, so my answer is now 3 years old (still accurate) and the original is now 6 years old. It has more than twice as many upvotes as mine, which languishes at the bottom of the page.

I have better things to do than labor for the wonks-run-wild at StackOverflow.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#117

Post by alangibson »

LaundroMat wrote: post #111

Just a side note, but one way of sifting through the features commenters have been suggesting and prioritizing them should you be wanting to create a product out of this is the Kano model. (I'm not affiliated, but here's a great guide to the model: https://foldingburritos.com/kano-model/ ) I just wanted to share this because I've only discovered it recently (although it's been around quite some time already) and beca…

Thanks for the links. I'm not planning on building anything right now, but the frustration that lead to me starting this thread might push me in to it one day.

As for the Kano model, I'd take it further and do what I call the Buffer model: price people want something by collecting payment details before you even start building the product.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#118

Post by mwarkentin »

cybrexalpha wrote: post #106
jasonpeacock wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a JIRA management failure - why is the same workflow being imposed on different teams? Either the company has agreed that all teams will follow the same workflow, then you do as described above, or each team owns their own workflow definitions.

>each team owns their own workflow definitions JIRA actively makes this hard. To modify a workflow a user has to be a Global JIRA Administrator. The whole design of JIRA is based around management. It's not really for developers, as much at is is for your boss. This explains why Atlassian can get away with the user experience being so bad - it doesn't matter because developers aren't the ones choosing it.

I think the “new” JIRA project is more self management focused. Of course it only supports a small subset of overall features right now.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#119

Post by F-0X »

iamdeedubs wrote: post #9

I'd like to have cli be a first class experience. Work offline. GUI for the pointy hairs.

Absolutely, I think this would be a huge improvement. The ability to easily extract plaintext data locally would be a huge help with my personal organisation and planning.
Post reply on HN