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

A lot of solutions posted so far (post-its, E-mail, whiteboard) work well for 2 person projects, with discipline scale to 20 person projects, are problematic for 200 person projects, and are totally inappropriate for 2000 person projects.

Specialized tools are recommended when projects scale beyond 10-20 people. Formal process helps. You also need to track risks as another poster pointed out. If your project is a part of a larger whole, you need to track dependencies and their schedules (other teams at your company, vendors/suppliers, 3rd party open source dependencies, etc.)

1. We do all of this from Github using issues, milestones and projects. We have a GitHub Slack integration which can also give a feel of what everyone's working on. We also have a meeting every Monday where everyone says what they'll be working on this week.

2. Master branch is always in production. Staging branch is always in staging. We use CircleCI for CI/CD.

3. Milestones in GitHub.

Responsible people who care about the work and have a spine when required are what keep projects on track.

I believe the most important task is to teach your team members those project management skills.

Teach them the skills to recognize unexpected events and know to communicate those bad news proactively. For example, an assigned task turned out to be much more difficult or larger scope than previously thought? Communicate. Uncertainty whether things can get done in time? Communicate. Feeling even the slightest uneasy about anything? Communicate.

Understanding of the business goals? You have to teach it and make it clear. You're not gonna have a textbox, type it in and expect the team to just get it. There's a difference between reading something, and understanding something.

Again, tools are "tools". No tool can allow your team to just be in zombie mode and not use their brain to think. Tools are there as an aid, not to fill in a hole in competencies.

Choose whichever tool that works for you. Observe how your team members are doing and teach them the necessary skills as needed.

At my company we've used simple Google doc, Asana, Trello, and now we're on JIRA. They all have pros and cons, but so far JIRA is working out alright and I think better than Trello.