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Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else?

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Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else?

#1

Post by jespr »

I've worked professionally as a software developer for close to ten years - and I still haven't heard a developer say that they're excited or outright like the project management/scrum/kanban tool they're using.

People seem to outright hate JIRA. They seem to like Trello a bit more but often say that it's lacking something - I used Sprintly years ago, but that also didn't seem to be perfect.

What is the perfect tool out there that you really like (if there is one?) - what are the shortcomings and things you would like to see the perfect tool have.. or doesn't such a thing exist because it simply comes down to each company's individual use case..

Curious to hear your thoughts! :)

Re: Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else?

#3

Post by SingAlong »

At work, we went from Asana to JIRA to Trello.

We stick to Trello because everyone in the company outside of Engineering team can also use it (nice & simple interface).

But I prefer to cut down the amount of human action any process. So I miss the JIRA-GitHub integration when using Trello. I could just mention the JIRA ticket ID in a PR and the ticket gets closed when the PR is merged. Such sweet integration.

I was looking forward to GitHub Projects when I heard about it since everyone in the company has a GitHub account. When I tried GitHub Projects, it felt so inverse to what I expected. I expected a GitHub Project to have many repositories instead of the current way (each project has many repositories). I'm hoping they change it.

Re: Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else?

#4

Post by dasmoth »

Most of these tools seem to exist more for the benefit of managers than hackers.

For small groups, I think I honest-to-goodness prefer TODO.txt in the top level of the relevant repository to any tool. Otherwise, GitHub issues is a pretty nice lightweight-ish tool.

Lack of an explicit model of a "sprint" (which often seems to be where formal process starts to get reified in these tools) is a big plus in my book.

Re: Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else?

#5

Post by jespr »

andymoe wrote: post #2

I've got a totally biases preference for Pivotal Tracker these days. It just kinda tells you what you're likely to get done each iteration. Really happy to not have the upfront commitment and ceremony of sprints in my life anymore.

Ugh. I meant to mention Pivotal as well in my original post - but I guess it slipped my mind :( That's what I used back in the day as well - and it seemed good, I can only imagine it has gotten better since

Re: Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else?

#6

Post by jespr »

SingAlong wrote: post #3

At work, we went from Asana to JIRA to Trello. We stick to Trello because everyone in the company outside of Engineering team can also use it (nice & simple interface). But I prefer to cut down the amount of human action any process. So I miss the JIRA-GitHub integration when using Trello. I could just mention the JIRA ticket ID in a PR and the ticket gets closed when the PR is merged. Such sweet integration. I was l…

Do PMs keep documentation around the features (high level, what's the purpose/function etc) in a separate tool than Trello? Or is that not a thing they do at all?

For Github Projects you mean each repository has many projects, but you wanted it to be each project could have many repositories, right? :) That does make it a lot harder, especially as what you work on grow bigger and span multiple repositories..

Re: Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else?

#7

Post by jespr »

dasmoth wrote: post #4

Most of these tools seem to exist more for the benefit of managers than hackers. For small groups, I think I honest-to-goodness prefer TODO.txt in the top level of the relevant repository to any tool. Otherwise, GitHub issues is a pretty nice lightweight-ish tool. Lack of an explicit model of a "sprint" (which often seems to be where formal process starts to get reified in these tools) is a big plus in my book.

Interesting.. yeah a todo in its simplest form is not a bad idea :)

When you say "explicit model of a sprint" do you think about the whole start-date, end-date kind of thing per Kanban board? Or is it the kanban board itself that sort of leads to this formal process?

Re: Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else?

#8

Post by dasmoth »

jespr wrote: post #7
dasmoth wrote: post #4

Most of these tools seem to exist more for the benefit of managers than hackers. For small groups, I think I honest-to-goodness prefer TODO.txt in the top level of the relevant repository to any tool. Otherwise, GitHub issues is a pretty nice lightweight-ish tool. Lack of an explicit model of a "sprint" (which often seems to be where formal process starts to get reified in these tools) is a big plus in my book.

Interesting.. yeah a todo in its simplest form is not a bad idea :) When you say "explicit model of a sprint" do you think about the whole start-date, end-date kind of thing per Kanban board? Or is it the kanban board itself that sort of leads to this formal process?

Good question. Kanban isn't something I've particularly experienced, but I'd be willing to believe that a simple Kanban board might be a useful level of coordination for some people. Although my inclination is to say that if you need a mechanism to track which stuff is being worked on, you might have either too many people, or excessively fine-grained tasks.

Re: Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else?

#10

Post by nrr »

dasmoth wrote: post #4

Most of these tools seem to exist more for the benefit of managers than hackers. For small groups, I think I honest-to-goodness prefer TODO.txt in the top level of the relevant repository to any tool. Otherwise, GitHub issues is a pretty nice lightweight-ish tool. Lack of an explicit model of a "sprint" (which often seems to be where formal process starts to get reified in these tools) is a big plus in my book.

I'll second this suggestion, but I want to add one more thing. I suggest also writing a number 0-9 at the beginning of each line in said TODO.txt that represents some degree of priority, whatever that might mean for your project.

If you do that, you're consequently allowed use of, e.g., `sort TODO.txt | head` to figure out what to work on for the week. In addition, you can add in a regular review cycle to re-evaluate priorities, and that's all then kept in version control with the rest of the project.

It also happens to tick the capital-A Agile checkboxes, and when you grow past the point where you have strictly hackers on your team, the lift to move to another, more manager-friendly project management tool isn't nearly as arduous.

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