Ask HN: What are some good tools for keeping a software project on track?

In my experience, what matters most is good communication. Whatever tool you use, what matter most is making sure your team are diligent about updating it, and about responding to updates by others. If you can get them doing that, then using a spreadsheet or a wall of post-it notes will give you 80% of the benefits of using the most advanced dashboard/kanban/IM tool. If you can't get them doing that, then even the most advanced tools won't save you.

For 1 and 3, it's the process that matters more than the tool. One process I found effective is maintaining a spreadsheet of tasks and a spreadsheet of larger milestones, updated in periodic meetings.

For the task spreadsheet, you can have a twice-a-week stand up where everyone goes around and updates their own tasks on a google sheet in turn.

For the milestone spreadsheet, a period between one month and one quarter works well.

Although meetings are often eschewed by software engineers, they really do help to keep projects on track.

Also appoint someone to be in charge of tracking the "health" of various milestones, red = needs course correction, orange = at risk, green = on track, etc.

The only project management tool I've ever seen work effectively - I'm not even kidding - is a whiteboard with Post-it notes stuck to it. Everything else is snake oil.

unfortunately, there is no one good tool. you'd have to use a combination of Asana, JIRA, and something like Productplan.

it is quite interesting to see that no one has yet created one that combines all three in a simple / minimal interface.

simply look at the tools you can find on Github or similar: issue tracker, wiki, versioning of release, etc.