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Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

tara.ai

171–180 of 182 posts

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#171
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> "do you devote two engineers"

Maybe one could say that in the beginning of the project, one can use that budget lever, but not in the end (mythical man month)

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: the board thing, Jira has actually been trying to solve this problem for years now with a concept called Simplified Workflows. [1] This allows the project admin to create Statuses and adjust their workflow without needing to get a Jira admin involved. The problem with this approach is that every project does something completely different (often times even multiple teams within a project use different processes)…

That's what we tried (our teams are self-organizing, as they are in Scrum, so we couldn't do it another way) but the things the teams wanted had hardly any consistency (partly because the products and projects are very different, partly because of the people).

This is where an experienced consultant can help. We often start with what you're describing here as the baseline, and then work to find a middle ground. I would say that 3/4 times we can find something that works for everyone. And it's ok that sometimes people need different workflows. Some Jira admins or managers trying to pull reports will be upset about this but they can be handled once you demonstrate why doing it this way provides more value to the org as a whole.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#173
post #2

Hey folks. My co-founder and I started noodling on productivity tools a few years ago. After interviewing 250+ engineers and founders, we discovered that most project management software a) takes a lot of time to configure b) is not built for cross-functional teams and c) takes away focus from the release cycle. The status quo is that engineers spend precious time wading through tickets, and EMs + PMs continue to lac…

Do you offer tools/services to folks who want to transition off of JIRA? How painful will this be? How long would it take? How many resources will folks require?

These are some questions potential buyers will have, specially if they are transitioning from a tool like JIRA and related suite of tools. It might be a good idea to capture this on the homepage.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#174

Well 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

Also pivotal....but pivotal is nice

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#175

I wish I could be off of Jira and all of Atlassian. Sadly, that is not my decision to make. Atlassian's antics with Jira, Confluence, and BitBucket have really started to make me mad. Jira is changing it's editor... slowly. The old editor had nice shortcuts, like h1. - h6., {code}, {blockquote} etc. When you create a ticket - it's the old editor, but when you edit a ticket or write a comment, it's the new editor! Thi…

it seems to me that often the people who decide whether to use Atlassian products aren't actually using them personally...

This is particularly prevalent where you have software teams working in a non software business. That’s an environment where you get execs pushing for ‘unity’, whatever that is, and every team must use jira (or Monday/notion etc).

Even worse, often they’ll expect you to use jira without the software specific features.

When my org tried this, it was a good test of my influence outside the dev team.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#176
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And this is how Jira started with it's complexity. Welcome to the club.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#177

I wish I could be off of Jira and all of Atlassian. Sadly, that is not my decision to make. Atlassian's antics with Jira, Confluence, and BitBucket have really started to make me mad. Jira is changing it's editor... slowly. The old editor had nice shortcuts, like h1. - h6., {code}, {blockquote} etc. When you create a ticket - it's the old editor, but when you edit a ticket or write a comment, it's the new editor! Thi…

Slightly confused by your comment, the new editor has gone from markdown-ish to actual markdown. That is easier/better.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#178

I wish I could be off of Jira and all of Atlassian. Sadly, that is not my decision to make. Atlassian's antics with Jira, Confluence, and BitBucket have really started to make me mad. Jira is changing it's editor... slowly. The old editor had nice shortcuts, like h1. - h6., {code}, {blockquote} etc. When you create a ticket - it's the old editor, but when you edit a ticket or write a comment, it's the new editor! Thi…

I'm happy that you are able to open Jira editors. Today I wasted half an hour to discover I can only open "My Work" (the timesheet summary page) if I'm on an issue page, not from the blank main page.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#179
Your Jira alternative is currently a better replacement for a limited but important part of Jira features: clearly only an initial, promising feature set that will be expanded and improved. But in what direction? The more technical side of software development (e.g. configuration, building and deployment of the releases)? Generic ticket handling and time tracking/accounting to expand the product's usefulness beyond specialized software product development teams? Integration with other software and processes?

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#180

Your Jira alternative is currently a better replacement for a limited but important part of Jira features: clearly only an initial, promising feature set that will be expanded and improved. But in what direction? The more technical side of software development (e.g. configuration, building and deployment of the releases)? Generic ticket handling and time tracking/accounting to expand the product's usefulness beyond s…

The key for our platform will always be simplicity. For now, the plan is to head into the technical side of software dev (Gitlab, Bitbucket and integrations with CI/CD tooling), without alienating business teams.

One of the biggest issues with existing PM software is that it's purpose built for singular teams, vs providing utility to cross-functional teams (e.g. engineering and growth). And it's usually overly complex with significant configuration required.

We're seeing early signs of this with requests from teams/orgs to add in marketing, growth and design teams as they need to be in the loop of releases and the overall SDLC.

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