Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#61

Post by xellisx » Fri, May 01, 2020, 12:55 AM UTC

techntoke wrote: post #27

derektwong wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our Github integration is a two-way sync, so that you can import any open GitHub issues into Tara as Tara tasks. If you update the corresponding the Tara task, the corresponding GitHub issues are also updated, so you can certainly keep using the GitHub issues. The main benefit of using Tara is that it provides the team a much better way of plan upcoming sprints, and the system also pulls in GitHub PRs to eliminate an…

So no self-hosted option like Phabricator?

A link for us lazy folks https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

I've been wanting set this up to play with, but not much free time. We use Kira and Bitbucket cloud at work and they suck.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#62

Post by alexmingoia » Fri, May 01, 2020, 1:47 AM UTC

sideproject wrote: post #56

I've been using clubhouse for myself and it's pretty much what I need in terms of "advanced to-do list" but "not as heavy as JIRA". What I'm more interested in is how project management software like this keeps popping up and I genuinely wonder what the rationale is? We use JIRA, Trello and Asana at work and between three of them, yeah, things are working. How much more do we want out of them? Not much. Let's just ge…

They keep popping up because ticket/todo-list software is a perfect medium for people to project their aspirations for success. People believe if they use that software they will accomplish their goals.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#63

Post by ekianjo » Fri, May 01, 2020, 2:09 AM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #14

juandazapata wrote: post #10

I couldn't find the pricing anywhere in the site.

It says "free" twice, in colored CTA buttons, in the first ~150px or so.

There's no such thing as "free" forever, especially if something is not even Free Software/Open source to begin with.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#64

Post by ALittleLight » Fri, May 01, 2020, 3:35 AM UTC

bberenberg wrote: post #31

beart wrote: post #7

Looks awesome and I would love to try it out. Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira + other related tools. Now that the majority of work is being done through Jira, it would take a world ending event to move away, no matter how good of a product the alternative is.

Disclaimer: I run an Atlassian consulting company. In most scenarios I run into, "Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira" translates into "Someone set up Jira poorly and now we dislike using it". The thing is that if you replace Jira with any tool you can imagine, the statement will hold true. Jira isn't inherently a better or worse tool than most others out there. If you're at an or…

Personally, I don't mind Kira. I also work at a megacorp that uses Jira and the idea that if I found something ten times as good as Jira I could somehow get the organization to switch just strikes me as absurd. We're too invested in Jira. Too many people using it. Too much internal stuff built on top of it. Change is unthinkable.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#65

Post by beart » Fri, May 01, 2020, 3:55 AM UTC

bberenberg wrote: post #31

beart wrote: post #7

Looks awesome and I would love to try it out. Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira + other related tools. Now that the majority of work is being done through Jira, it would take a world ending event to move away, no matter how good of a product the alternative is.

Disclaimer: I run an Atlassian consulting company. In most scenarios I run into, "Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira" translates into "Someone set up Jira poorly and now we dislike using it". The thing is that if you replace Jira with any tool you can imagine, the statement will hold true. Jira isn't inherently a better or worse tool than most others out there. If you're at an or…

> Jira isn't inherently a better or worse tool than most others out there.

I'm not sure I can fully agree with this based on my experience.

When you talk about Jira being set up poorly, it makes me think about how workflows, permissions, project structures, etc are configured. This is definitely a pain point for me and I'm sure someone like yourself could bring a lot of improvements in this area. I fully buy that Jira is extremely powerful in this regard and it is possibly my orgs's fault for why it sucks so bad right now.

However, there are some other issues that I imagine are not so easily correctable. These pain points are mostly related to how the product integrates with other software - how slow it is, how cumbersome and nonintuitive the UI is, and how absolutely god awful the content editors are - particularly the wysiwyg editor in confluence (seriously bad!).

Maybe I'm off base here, so feel free to correct me. I'm sure you've had more experience with these products than I. However, I have used a lot of alternatives and from the point of view of a simple user, the Atlassian experience is not on par.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#66

Post by jimmySixDOF » Fri, May 01, 2020, 3:55 AM UTC

discreteevent wrote: post #50

lifebeyondfife wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a manager I follow two principles that help me to prioritise tasks for a weekly sprint. First, every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two. So it's not about not trusting the development team. It's about understanding the tradeoffs and how the delivery date will be affected. Second, how well can you predict what you can achieve as a developer in one day vs one hundred days? The estimat…

> every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two You forgot about quality. It can blow the other 3 out of the water.

Quality is implied within the feature/scope grouping. Its always a three leg stool trade off for balance. Changing your quality output is just reducing or adding to scope requirements.

Budget = Resuorces / Time = Time / Scope = Quality

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#67

Post by Aeolun » Fri, May 01, 2020, 4:06 AM UTC

m1sta_ wrote: post #33

On premise option?

As long as it’s not on-premise, it’s not a Jira alternative.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#68

Post by westoque » Fri, May 01, 2020, 4:08 AM UTC

Not sure if it's only me. But there's some funky funky things happening on that frontend. There's a white modal that covers that whole screen that pops out at every page load.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#69

Post by Aeolun » Fri, May 01, 2020, 4:09 AM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #22

As someone who makes this type of product, I tend to hate this industry. We make things far more complicated than they need be. It's all just ticketing software with labels changed and I just want a list of all the tickets for me to manually filter. I'm tired of companies thinking I don't know the best way to see the tickets I want to see.

I made this for Jira. It just ingests all the issues in the project, and displays them in a big list, sorted by a variety of factors (is it assigned to me? Is it in progress?). It generally allows me to just go down the list of issues until there’s nothing left unfinished.

At some point I realized that there’s just no stopping enterprise from going to use Jira, so it’s better to work around it.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#70

Post by beart » Fri, May 01, 2020, 4:12 AM UTC

rexpop wrote: post #25

beart wrote: post #7

Looks awesome and I would love to try it out. Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira + other related tools. Now that the majority of work is being done through Jira, it would take a world ending event to move away, no matter how good of a product the alternative is.

> I work at a large company... it would take a world ending event to move. What's your current Theory of Change[0] for how to affect decisions at a large company? Are you simply "paying your dues" and moving up in the ranks until you've accumulated enough political capital to make unilateral changes in the working lives of your underlings? How much does your individual organizational agility[1] figure into it? Are yo…

I've attempted to push change at a local level (team + department) in various forms with limited success.

Generally, I get a lot of positive feedback and "we should do that!" responses without any follow through.

At one point some of my pushing lead to a significant departmental change. However, within a short time frame, just as everyone was starting to buy in, something new came down the pipe from on-high and became "the thing".

More recently my approach has been to bypass any sort of organizational hierarchy. Instead I've identified a handful of peers who seem interested in these things and figuring out how we can make our lives easier even if no one else wants to get on board. But this only works for things that are not mandated by the company.