Sprint? Most of the most productive teams i know use Kanban approach which Jira does support. Any team i have been on tied to sprints has been a right clusterfeck
Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira
91–100 of 182 posts
Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Super amazing that you're aiming to have it free for unlimited users. I wonder if it's worth sharing prominently on the website a bit about the plan and an explanation of how you expect to fund this project. Without someone paying for the development it's not clear to anyone why this won't collapse and be closed in a month.
Good idea! We definitely need a pricing page to highlight the free forever plan.
Another recommendation is that I see task states are To Do, Doing, and Done. It'd be nice to have a Review state as well which could be used to say it's ready for either code review or QA. This could also end up being a runaway train so it may be better invest time in allowing the user to specify up to x (3?) amount of additional custom states.
Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira
#93It’s a nice looking tool, but the marketing feels oh so very Enterprise Agile(tm) in ethos. “Run your weekly sprints on time” — as opposed to them taking two weeks? To achieve predictability, something has to give. It’s usually “learning” which is never on the plan. The next release will be done when the right top priorities are met well enough. When’s that? You decide by prioritizing how many priorities are in the r…
As a manager I follow two principles that help me to prioritise tasks for a weekly sprint. First, every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two. So it's not about not trusting the development team. It's about understanding the tradeoffs and how the delivery date will be affected. Second, how well can you predict what you can achieve as a developer in one day vs one hundred days? The estimat…
I’m starting to be fairly confident that the ‘budget’ lever for a project might as well be disconnected from the feature and timeliness ones. Spending more money doesn’t make things go any faster. Especially adding more people makes things fo slower.
Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira
#94As someone who makes this type of product, I tend to hate this industry. We make things far more complicated than they need be. It's all just ticketing software with labels changed and I just want a list of all the tickets for me to manually filter. I'm tired of companies thinking I don't know the best way to see the tickets I want to see.
I made this for Jira. It just ingests all the issues in the project, and displays them in a big list, sorted by a variety of factors (is it assigned to me? Is it in progress?). It generally allows me to just go down the list of issues until there’s nothing left unfinished. At some point I realized that there’s just no stopping enterprise from going to use Jira, so it’s better to work around it.
Can you show us what you made?
Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a manager I follow two principles that help me to prioritise tasks for a weekly sprint. First, every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two. So it's not about not trusting the development team. It's about understanding the tradeoffs and how the delivery date will be affected. Second, how well can you predict what you can achieve as a developer in one day vs one hundred days? The estimat…
I’m starting to be fairly confident that the ‘budget’ lever for a project might as well be disconnected from the feature and timeliness ones. Spending more money doesn’t make things go any faster. Especially adding more people makes things fo slower.
Completely agree on the not going any faster point. The Mythical Man Month demonstrates this exact concept perfectly.
The budget lever is still available in limited forms e.g. do you devote two engineers from the team to project A or three? The point here is that the engineers have to be already up to speed on the codebase and already know how to work with their colleagues; and adding more on project A leaves fewer for project B, C, and D etc.
Also there is monetary budget. Can I solve an engineering inefficiency by throwing larger servers, or buying a licence for a relevant software service?
Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira
#96One thing that bugs me with development workflow tools is how they never really integrate with the true workflow of developers. Once you have a development workflow with Pull Requests, Code reviews, QA etc, it would be nice to be able to encode it into the
What's the true progress of an issue (ticket, work item...)? Why do I need to remember to set a ticket to "resolved" after a PR completes, and so on.
Every place has a different workflow and they are usually very complex, but these tools (Jira, YouTrack, GitHub issues, Azure DevOps, ...) are complex. They are often configurable, yet they still (as far as I'm aware) fail to integrate the process part of things with the code part of things. At best you have some loose integration between version control and process e.g. "this ticket has these changes" but they don't integrate the two processes so that the state-machine that is a ticket (is it done? why is it not? is it because a PR build failed? Is it because an approval that must be done after merge has failed? is it because the issue has several pull requests associated with it and not all are merged yet?).
I absolutely don't mind complexity in these tools. Having an extremely simple post-it process is good. This is the second best. The process complexity in big enterprises and distributed teams will always be there. If I can configure a tool to make it go away I'm glad. The worst situation is when you have a hyper complicated process and no tools to help. That's the situation many businesses are in. "You didn't mark the two fields and change the state to Y and then send the email to the translation person and notify the regional development person about the change! You have to do that".
Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira
#97One thing that bugs me with development workflow tools is how they never really integrate with the true workflow of developers. Once you have a development workflow with Pull Requests, Code reviews, QA etc, it would be nice to be able to encode it into the What's the true progress of an issue (ticket, work item...)? Why do I need to remember to set a ticket to "resolved" after a PR completes, and so on. Every place h…
> Why do I need to remember to set a ticket to "resolved" after a PR completes, and so on.
This is my biggest peeve. Every place you have other stuff related to a project, whether it's Trello, Jira, Google Drive, O365, Miro, Confluence, Figma, Travis, CodeClimate, etc etc etc, it's just another ever-increasing set of things to try to keep in sync and up to date.
It makes onboarding new members way more difficult and make everything slower, more frustrating and more error-prone.
Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira
#98One thing that bugs me with development workflow tools is how they never really integrate with the true workflow of developers. Once you have a development workflow with Pull Requests, Code reviews, QA etc, it would be nice to be able to encode it into the What's the true progress of an issue (ticket, work item...)? Why do I need to remember to set a ticket to "resolved" after a PR completes, and so on. Every place h…
I haven't really used it but with Youtrack you can apply arbitrary commands to your ticket from a github commit.
And I can certify that Youtrack is ridiculously configurable. As in "execute arbitrary code when a ticket is updated" configurable.
Both of these features are maybe a bit too powerful (especially together), but they do enable any particular workflow you want.
Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira
#99Well done for getting your project out there ! I'm sure its great. I've commented on this in the past. This is what I want from my "ticketing-software": -I don't want 100 ways todo things or configure a ticketing tool... -Sell me the BEST "Software Development PROCESS" with a tool. -Don't give me a "Great Ticketing-System" ! I want to know what is the fastest, best process to develop software and track it. All of "th…
That was the fogbugz approach, I hated fogbugz as it was too prescriptive
Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on what your timeline is for changes, but you can also learn how to use it and do it yourself. My experience is that if an org decides to use then they will do it wrong the first time without external assistance. This holds true even for popular tools like Postgres, AWS, Terraform, or even Git. Anecdotally, I don't know of any tool that is highly configurable that makes it easy for users to set it up and then…
I feel that Jira first adds a lot of restraints and red tape, and then makes those highly configurable. I prefer tools that don't have the constraints in the first place. Ie if in the middle of the sprint a developer finds that some tickets are stuck waiting for some other team and he wants a column on the board to make that visible, he should just be able to add the column. In Jira if I accidentally put the wrong is…
Make a status for blocked, create a column for that status