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Ask HN: How do you track issues, todos, features?

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31–40 of 78 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you track issues, todos, features?

#31
At my company, over the last 6 months we've tried Trello, Pivotal, and Sprintly. At past companies I've used Trac, Jira, and Asana. And for the last 7 years I've kept a daily todo.txt, where I append today's date and the 1-2 things I want to try to get done, adding detail as I figure out plans. (This is the only task tracking tool I've recommended that coworkers adopt and are actually using years later)

I've come to conclude that no tool for this will ever satisfy everybody's needs perfectly. Part of that is that everyone has different priorities for their task tracking tool. And frankly, some of those priorities are directly contradictory. What's trackable and detailed to a project manager who lives in the task tracker is heavyweight and clunky to an engineer who sees it as a bookkeeping annoyance. My personal todo.txt is exactly me-focused and only changes when I want it to, but it scales to exactly one engineer.

I think you just have to pick something and use it. Changing tools just adds friction and costs you familiarity. Ideally, the people who have to interact with it the most choose the best tool for them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track issues, todos, features?

#32
Something simple like Wunderlist or Asana is a good choice, IMO. The less time you spend dealing with your PM tool, the more time you can spend on actually doing important things.

I've also heard this argument if you're running a product, though I'm not sure how on board I am with it: don't record user requests. The important ones will be requested enough that you'll remember it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track issues, todos, features?

#35
post #15

Looking at some of those 'complex' management tasks it seems like a missing feature would be to poll your repositories to look for TODO: 's and list them. For instance, I'm the sole developer of my web backend, iOS and android platformy thing and while android studio has good TODO: Integration sublime and Xcode require plugins, it would be awesome to have something that looks at all three repositories and tells me wh…

Atom has a package like that, it finds TODO in your code and returns that line in a list. You could open a folder containing the other repos in Atom and achieve that.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track issues, todos, features?

#37
post #9

I would recommend Jira - get the GreenHopper plugin to make it less "old-fashioned", but it's the right tool for the job. You can customize it if you want to go down that rabbit hole, but the built-in workflows should get you started. Projects, epics and tags should solve the problem of finding issues. Set each client as a project, or more likely as an epic so you can have one view for your developers / designers tha…

Since October, JIRA+GreenHopper = JIRA Software.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track issues, todos, features?

#38
I worked for a company that used Request Tracker for this stuff. It worked for our purposes. I also used it in another context after that.

For the free software projects on the web I'm familiar with, many use Bugzilla to deal with issues and feature requests. Also popular, although a little less so, seems to be Trac. They are all over the web - http://bugzilla.redhat.com is one example for Bugzilla, https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/latest an example for Trac.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track issues, todos, features?

#39
post #9

I would recommend Jira - get the GreenHopper plugin to make it less "old-fashioned", but it's the right tool for the job. You can customize it if you want to go down that rabbit hole, but the built-in workflows should get you started. Projects, epics and tags should solve the problem of finding issues. Set each client as a project, or more likely as an epic so you can have one view for your developers / designers tha…

Jira with Bitbucket Server works for us pretty well. You just have to resist the urge to customize too much and stick to the basics instead. BTW you don't need Greenhopper anymore. Jira Agile is now integrated into Jira software
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