Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

zepel.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 83 posts

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#71

Post by MegaButts »

grey-area wrote: post #67
MegaButts wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the first to admit that as a whole, Jira is poorly used. That said, it's surprisingly powerful software. It's just that nobody takes the time to learn how to use it properly. Think of how shitty your first massive OOP language project was. Think of how different coding schemas and practices are between companies. Now realize that over the years, better and best practices have started to be established. Obviou…

So it sounds like what you're really complaining about is that the Jira admins and program managers at your company are just not good at their job...The problem is the people in charge of Jira usually suck. And that's a much harder problem to fix. Or perhaps the problem is that Jira gives people too much rope to hang themselves with. It should not be possible to make the experience of users sub-par by 'holding it wro…

> Or perhaps the problem is that Jira gives people too much rope to hang themselves with.

This is like complaining that C (or assembly, or VHDL) is too complicated, and we should all use easier languages like Java, Python, and Ruby.

>It should not be possible to make the experience of users sub-par by 'holding it wrong', and it should not take months or years to learn to use a project management tool IMO - the project should be over by then!

It should not be possible for engineers to do this, which is why the Jira admins should be to blame for setting up a shitty Jira environment. And how long it takes to learn Jira is irrelevant to engineers because you're never supposed to have to learn Jira beyond "move your tickets to done when you're done." How long should it take to learn C++, or Kubernetes, or TensorRT? Do we say those are all a waste of time as well because engineers need to set aside time learning a new language/technology/tool in order to help them do their jobs?

> Tools like Jira should get out of the way, not get in the way of the real work.

I agree. The problem is it sounds like you're assuming I think engineers should learn Jira. Engineers should not spend more than a few minutes a day "dealing" with Jira, on average (ideally no more than 30 seconds, but that's a bit optimistic at a real company). If you spend more than a few minutes a day struggling with Jira, you should bitch to whoever is in charge of Jira. But if you really believe that 15 minutes a week of your time in order for the organization to function at much high levels is a waste of your efforts, then perhaps you should set out to redefine project management. I assure you, there is a shitload of money to be made if you think you can do it better.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#73

Post by yellowapple »

Looks nice, and I really like how straightforward it is to create and work with subtasks.

I'm immediately seeing two pain points, though:

1. A lot of the text fields seem to have a nasty habit of jumping the cursor back to the beginning of the text, thus causing me to accidentally enter things "islike th". This is a sure sign that y'all are probably overthinking/overengineering the text inputs :) Also, not having a visual indicator of whether or not a text field actually saved is absurdly annoying, especially when the text I enter doesn't get saved when I close a given screen...

2. Just because I'm entering something as a work item doesn't mean I'm actually the requestor of that item. Being entirely unable to change the requestor to something arbitrary eradicates one of my prospective use cases for this. I'd assume that if there were multiple users setup in Zepel I'd be able to choose them, but I don't want to have to setup end-users with Zepel logins just so that I can track who's bugging me about a particular feature or bug.

Looks promising, though. Certainly a lot more intuitive than JIRA.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#74

Post by dragonsh »

e12e wrote: post #52
dragonsh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Taiga [1] [2] truly open source beautiful system supporting both kanban and scrum style development. It's very intuitive with beautiful cards based interface. It also support user story point poker to assign story points. Indeed it can be projected directly on a wall screen to see a kanban board in real-time with customizable details. Also with easy plugin system, it can extend to integrate with other system in c…

Looks interesting, if a little convoluted to set up for self host? A couple of outdated docker-compose third party projects, and official script that is in alpha and depends on vagrant..? Maybe the most sensible is cloudron - also unsupported?

Their guide [1] is step by step and very easy to self-host. Indeed in our place we started using it with very early version and moved to new version without any issues.

We use LXD container and launching is as easy as:

   $lxc launch your-pm-1.0 yourpm1
Everything else is just automatically configured.

[1] https://taigaio.github.io/taiga-doc/dist/

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#75

Post by johnx123-up »

e12e wrote: post #52
dragonsh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Taiga [1] [2] truly open source beautiful system supporting both kanban and scrum style development. It's very intuitive with beautiful cards based interface. It also support user story point poker to assign story points. Indeed it can be projected directly on a wall screen to see a kanban board in real-time with customizable details. Also with easy plugin system, it can extend to integrate with other system in c…

Looks interesting, if a little convoluted to set up for self host? A couple of outdated docker-compose third party projects, and official script that is in alpha and depends on vagrant..? Maybe the most sensible is cloudron - also unsupported?

Or, perhaps, Restyaboard?

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#76

Post by somada141 »

First off congrats on launching and thanks for the "small teams eat free" pricing tier!!!

I've just tried Zepel out by importing my current project off Trello (loved that this feature was available) so here's some things that threw me off: - I'd like an easy way to move multiple cards from one board list into another cause I can't multi-select or drag-select. Organising a freshly imported project is a hassle without this. - When creating a new feature I couldn't find a way to drag existing tasks/cards into it but as far as I could see I'd have to create new ones. - I would expect tags to auto-complete when adding them to a card but it didn't seem to work.

Generally it seems to work well if one is populating a new project from scratch but cleaning up an imported project would require a little more thought and additional features cause the barrier to entry for users of existing products seems rather high.

Keep up the good work!

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#77

Post by Tharkun »

rangitatanz wrote: post #70
Tharkun wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A subset of engineers hate Jira. A lot of us love it. It's orders of magnitude better than any other issue tracker out there. It's an absolute powerhouse with its "Jira Query Language" query support. It scales from tiny one man shops (in which case it costs you a tenner), to massive organizations like the Apache Software Foundation. It's got bells and whistles to spare, including several kitchen sinks, which can make…

Curious to know if you have seen any project management software with either good calendar or planning support built in? What made it better?

I wish I had. Been looking for that holy grail for some time.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#78

Post by gauthamshankar »

somada141 wrote: post #76

First off congrats on launching and thanks for the "small teams eat free" pricing tier!!! I've just tried Zepel out by importing my current project off Trello (loved that this feature was available) so here's some things that threw me off: - I'd like an easy way to move multiple cards from one board list into another cause I can't multi-select or drag-select. Organising a freshly imported project is a hassle without…

Thank you for the feedback. We are working on the multi-select functionality in boards, alternatively, you can multi-select items inside a list or feature and move them to other boards. We understand it can be a bit hard without it while organizing an imported project and we will add the functionality soon. Regarding the auto-complete its something that should be working. Will take a look at it.

Agreed, the post-import experience has a lot of room for improvement and we are constantly iterating on it.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#79

Post by grey-area »

MegaButts wrote: post #71
grey-area wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it sounds like what you're really complaining about is that the Jira admins and program managers at your company are just not good at their job...The problem is the people in charge of Jira usually suck. And that's a much harder problem to fix. Or perhaps the problem is that Jira gives people too much rope to hang themselves with. It should not be possible to make the experience of users sub-par by 'holding it wro…

> Or perhaps the problem is that Jira gives people too much rope to hang themselves with. This is like complaining that C (or assembly, or VHDL) is too complicated, and we should all use easier languages like Java, Python, and Ruby. >It should not be possible to make the experience of users sub-par by 'holding it wrong', and it should not take months or years to learn to use a project management tool IMO - the projec…

If you spend more than a few minutes a day struggling with Jira, you should bitch to whoever is in charge of Jira. But if you really believe that 15 minutes a week of your time

This doesn't reflect my experience at all as a developer in small teams.

I spend quite a lot of time in the issue tracker - it is one of the main ways (along with email and conversations) that I interact with other team members and track work in the team. I can't imagine any situation where developers would spend just 15 minutes a week in an issue tracker and be able to do their job effectively, even junior devs should be spending more time than that responding to feedback and explaining what they have done, scope changes, what to test etc etc.

Creating software is not all writing code - much of it is thinking and interacting with other people, before you even start writing code, and then iterating fast on what you have written, gathering feedback along the way. An issue tracker is one of the tools used to do that.

So the tools are important, and Jira gets almost everything wrong in my view.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#80

Post by MegaButts »

grey-area wrote: post #79
MegaButts wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or perhaps the problem is that Jira gives people too much rope to hang themselves with. This is like complaining that C (or assembly, or VHDL) is too complicated, and we should all use easier languages like Java, Python, and Ruby. >It should not be possible to make the experience of users sub-par by 'holding it wrong', and it should not take months or years to learn to use a project management tool IMO - the projec…

If you spend more than a few minutes a day struggling with Jira, you should bitch to whoever is in charge of Jira. But if you really believe that 15 minutes a week of your time This doesn't reflect my experience at all as a developer in small teams. I spend quite a lot of time in the issue tracker - it is one of the main ways (along with email and conversations) that I interact with other team members and track work…

I'm not saying you shouldn't spend more than 15 minutes a week documenting, discussing, and diagnosing bugs and developing features. I'm saying you shouldn't spend more than a few minutes a day having to wrangle Jira. If you want to find a bug that's relevant to you, it should literally take 1 second for you to load the page that tells you your sprint and backlog and start looking at it. All of this should be managed by a program manager. You shouldn't have to repeat anything from GitHub. You shouldn't have to go digging for bugs to work on. You shouldn't need to go looking for documentation. All of these things are supposed to be done by someone else.

> Jira gets almost everything wrong in my view.

What specifically would you like to be different?

Post reply on HN