Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Looking for an Alternative to Jira

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 79 posts

Re: Ask HN: Looking for an Alternative to Jira

#41
If your project is really small you might get away with “Microsoft Teams” which for most business people comes free with Office.

It integrates directly into your Office 365 users and supports some very basic features such as custom swim lanes, multiple channels, tagging (only a few colours available), due dates, calendar view

Re: Ask HN: Looking for an Alternative to Jira

#43
post #12

If your source repositories are on Github, please consider Github issues. You'll need to setup a lot of labels to handle the different status, priority and component fields that you'd normally get in JIRA, and you'll have to use Github "projects". You'll also have to use issue checklists instead of subtasks. I'd do it myself if our organization's process wasn't so deeply integrated with JIRA.

Any issue tracking system is only as good as your ability to act on the information in it. Github issues' apparent simplicity is to your advantage here so I'd stay away from trying to recreate Jira with it.

Kanban boards are a great visualisation tool but the lack of screen real estate limits their effectiveness - more than two screen of information and you end up not being able to see the forest for all the trees in the way. Github projects help a lot with this as you can usually break a project down by structure (modules) or time (milestones). On a given Github board you can easily move cards between projects so the system becomes quite scaleable - within reason.

Kanban boards (if you can keep them manageable) are also a great customer-facing tool. The structure is simple enough to comprehend easily and the customer, product manager, etc. can visualise progress much more easily. They are a great communication tool as they deliver a certain amount of empowerment to the customer.

Checklists are infinitely better for subtasks for similar reasons as the boards - all information and all progress is forced to be on one card - that means it has to be readable and understandable by everyone.

The only limitation I have found with Github issues is that the screen real-estate in the editor is relatively limited. If they had a more complex editor along the lines of Google Docs then it would be possible to achieve the Holy Grail of Issue Tracking where all tickets were well written and had all the information in one place.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for an Alternative to Jira

#44

You can get reasonably far with Trello, if all you're doing is item tracking. If you're trying to do anything more than a free-for-all workflow, or wanting to do reporting, it's less good.

+1 on Trello. I'm a Scrum Master and we use it in our current team (~10 devs). I miss the reporting JIRA has tbh, but we get along just fine using workarounds (estimating in cards, etc). Good luck!

Why not use pivotal tracker then? It is trello + estimation.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for an Alternative to Jira

#45

If your project is really small you might get away with “Microsoft Teams” which for most business people comes free with Office. It integrates directly into your Office 365 users and supports some very basic features such as custom swim lanes, multiple channels, tagging (only a few colours available), due dates, calendar view

You mean Azure DevOps?

Re: Ask HN: Looking for an Alternative to Jira

#47

You can try Taiga [1] it supports kanban style or scrum style development with a very beautiful interface. It has all you need built-in with issues, epics, tasks, sprint or just a kanban board. Both front-end and back-end are open source. It can be customized easily and can be integrated with video conference, IRC, slack, CI, Gitlab, GitHub, kallithea-scm or just with git and mercurial easily. Backend is built using…

I've noticed a lot of people mentioning Taiga in the comments, and it looks like it's got everything we'd need.

I'll have a dig and see if there's a Docker script to run up a test/eval installation. I might have tried to install it before, but the separate "backend" and "frontend" made it look quite complex to install.

Python is a big plus, I know how to make that decently performant on our VPS (half our tech stack is Python based).

Re: Ask HN: Looking for an Alternative to Jira

#48

Clubhouse. It's genuinely brilliant https://clubhouse.io/ . Basically super trello, has epics, projects, milestones, GH integration etc, but doesn't feel bloated.

How do you work with bug triage in Clubhouse? So far I've found categorising a bit difficult, especially for long-term tracking of issues.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for an Alternative to Jira

#49

You can give a try at Redmine. I've used it and I think the differences might be pros for some and cons for others. The UI is, in my opinion, bad, and it lacks some features from Jira. That being said, since it's open source (coded in Ruby), you can personalize it, add your own features (or others that are already out there) and host it yourself. At the same time there's a lot of hosting companies that do that for yo…

+1 for Redmine, as it can be self-hosted and doesn't need to hand out your information to SaaS ones like Trello or Taiga

Re: Ask HN: Looking for an Alternative to Jira

#50
post #12

If your source repositories are on Github, please consider Github issues. You'll need to setup a lot of labels to handle the different status, priority and component fields that you'd normally get in JIRA, and you'll have to use Github "projects". You'll also have to use issue checklists instead of subtasks. I'd do it myself if our organization's process wasn't so deeply integrated with JIRA.

Lack of issue deps and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart are the biggest annoyances.
Post reply on HN