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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.
Give me an online tool any day, I work in software development, not in arts and crafts
Tracking the larger goals is often not well formalized, but I like this podcast episode about levels of planning in agile projects: http://deliveritcast.com/ep33-always-be-planning. It's often included in frameworks for scaling scrum, like SAFE of scrum of scrums.
2. is a purely technical problem. If I remember correctly, stuff deployed to heroku corresponds to git branches, so it should be pretty easy to create some visualization about what's deployed right now from looking at git repos. I could be wrong here.
Small team here. 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.
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.
We use Trello and it works great. Its closest skeuomorphic equivalent is... a whiteboard with Post-it notes stuck to it.
If you have stringent rules in place like "only the project manager can add cards, they can only add them in the sprint planning session on Monday morning, and we are keeping strictly to Kanban", then Trello will work fine - but any competent project manager should also be able to use JIRA, and will surely benefit from its extra functionality (and any non-technical stakeholder should at least be able to log into JIRA and click the requisite few buttons to see the current sprint and the backlog, if they care enough).
But hey, each to their own.
I know there's also a lot of scorn for agile, but the core tenet is really just writing well-defined stories. Make each ticket the smallest possible feature with incremental value than can be built, tested and deployed. Then stack your tickets in priority order. Everything else about the process is for communication and visibility, but if you write your stories well, they are less important.
We can see what everyone is working on just by looking at the stories in our 'in development' list which show who picked up that story.
We can also group stories into epics and milestones to track progress towards larger goals
For example my dashboard I has a 2 column layout, on the left top is my in-progress stuff and down the left side is the other team members in progress stuff. On the right top is my assigned tasks and below is monitored tasks. This layout is useful to me for tracking my work and I get to stay aware what the others are working on. It helps a lot to keep tickets small in scope, so you can rotate them fairly often.
Of course what works depends on the nature of your teams work. Anyways, just some ideas.
I've worked on several remote teams and for keeping up with each other the best combo I've found is a daily chat based standup, optionally with a standup-bot. Along with a ticket tracking systems with an in-progress state + a dashboard layout that includes your teams in-progress stuff. For example my dashboard I has a 2 column layout, on the left top is my in-progress stuff and down the left side is the other team me…
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.
Post-it doesn't even stick properly after the 2nd time Give me an online tool any day, I work in software development, not in arts and crafts