No self-hosted option? Passing this one.
Linear – A fast issue tracker
131–140 of 230 posts
Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slightly OT thought, but related to ticket tracking systems and the idea of reduced backlogs: As we move more and more towards ubiquitous "Product Orgs," separate from engineering, I think we're seeing backlogs just explode in size at most places. People need to realize that a large engineering backlog has a lot of negative effects on the SDLC (& velocity) as a whole. I wish more people would embrace heavy-handed WIP…
What I wish is that companies had people specialized in handling issue tracking systems. Expecting developers to do this is absurdo, a lot of the work is just making sure that the ticket is not a duplicate, and similar issues.
On some level, I kind of wish the entire cottage industry of "issue tracking systems" would just go away. What's wrong with a simple Kanban board? What has ever been wrong with that? It seems to me like, in a lot of cases, engineers just lost their nerve in terms of confidently talking to sales people and the business side of the company, and couldn't deal with the (imo, healthy) tension any more. I understand that people want estimates and timelines and stuff like that, and those are totally reasonable. But flagellating ourselves over absurdly small timelines, and hand-wringing over tiny pieces of features of projects as the core driver for engineering productivity, just seems crazy to me. It seems a lot more like purely signalling to the business side some vague ideas about "commitment," or "hustle," or whatever without having to speak to "those obnoxious sales people."
Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
By product org do you mean a silo of an organisation dedicated to one particular product (so if a company has five "apps" they have five siloes and five marketing teams five engineering teams and five board members ?
I understand it to mean that there is a part of the org (separate from the engineering team) that shapes the direction of the product; decides "these are the features we're going to implement, these are the issues we're going to address"; one way of looking at it is that their primary output is putting things in to the engineering team's backlog.
Yeah, this is what I was talking about. Software product management as a separate functional org from engineering.
Not like old-Dupont-style product orgs.
Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slightly OT thought, but related to ticket tracking systems and the idea of reduced backlogs: As we move more and more towards ubiquitous "Product Orgs," separate from engineering, I think we're seeing backlogs just explode in size at most places. People need to realize that a large engineering backlog has a lot of negative effects on the SDLC (& velocity) as a whole. I wish more people would embrace heavy-handed WIP…
yes. engineers almost always make poor product decisions if the customer is not also an engineering team, in my (vast) experience. this is because engineers aren't product experts. and if the customer is an engineering team, then engineers mostly make mediocre decisions, typically because of poor incentives (gaming story points). in every company i've been at that is larger than a handful of people that all know each…
Having an entire separate org whose sole job is to create backlog items inevitably ends up with 100s of items, 15-30% of which are "high" priority. Many of these will have out of date specs by the time engineering can pull them in.
I would much rather have product folks embedded in the engineering team. That way they can be working on making sure any issues on deck to be worked on next have up to date, clear requirements, and issues are prioritized correctly.
Having product people separated into their own organization almost always leads to a "throw it over the wall" situation.
Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker
#135This may be a minority opinion, but I'm disappointed that so many core workflow apps like ticketing still living in the browser. Any serious programmer would scoff at the idea at their main IDE being within a browser, so why is it acceptable for a ticketing system, which is nearly as core to our workflows?
We recommend people to install the desktop app so it's easy to keep open. However, people still like the ability to easily link to issues, even if they don't have the app installed, hence the web browser support.
Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker
#136I have a rough time understanding why I'd pick this over the issue tracker integrated with my source control. I get that it can sync with GitHub or GitLab (Does it sync the issue text/comments such that GitHub users can comment on the issues? Are the issues on both sides using the same numbering? In this case, is Linear just a GitHub issues client?) but I imagine I am losing out on any given feature that my source co…
You don't want your issue tracker in your source control if your product includes multiple source repositories, and a single bug might span several, or need to move between them. Also, if you have customers who file bugs, they don't care about your code structure. And maybe they shouldn't have read access to your code?
You can just create an "issues" or "feedback" repository.
Then you get the benefits of first-class integration with your code and CI/CD pipeline.
Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker
#137I want issue tracking where everything thing is saved to a hit repository. I’ve started using a crude version of this where each open issue is a directory, there is README.md for each issue and supporting files go in the same directory and get relatively linked to in the readme. When an issue is closed you delete the directory. When you need to reopen an issue you revert the commit that deleted the directory. It’s al…
Check out git-bug [1].
It's a decentralized issue tracker that stores the data in Git and offers a CLI/TUI/web UI.
Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depending on your company culture, this may be difficult to do, but I've seen good luck with moving toward a model where the product team doesn't push things into developers' to-do lists. The product folks supply a strictly prioritized wish list, and developers pull from it. Always one thing at a time, always the very first thing on the list. It's the only way I've seen to get the product people to shift their thinki…
What kind of scope level do you think works when talking about that list? Like project level instead of tasks, and then engineering figures out how to deliver the prioritized project? Otherwise it kinda just sounds like a backlog to me, just curious how you see the difference there. Also, I've seen product orgs that focus a lot of energy on not being burned, regardless of the scenario. They use their position at the…
It's going to invariably depend on how your company is organized, and its culture.
If you're at all able to start with something approaching the business-facing parts of Scrum, I think that's a great place to start. In Scrum, there are ideally two completely separate queues: The product backlog belongs to the business folks, and is organized in a way that works for them, and the dev team's list of tasks belongs to dev, and probably shouldn't look similar at all. And the only way for things to move from one queue to the other is during a regular meeting where the dev team says, "OK, it looks like we've got room to take on X additional work, what can you give us?"
And then, and I think this is secretly one of the most important things, the dev team physically creates new tickets for the new work they're taking on. You should never be able to just drag-and-drop tickets from one queue to the other. Ideally, it shouldn't even be physically possible to do so. Where I am right now, one is in $JIRA_COMPETITOR, and the other is an Excel spreadsheet. (If we all worked out of the same office, I'd probably go for an Excel spreadsheet and yellow sticky notes on a wall. Yellow sticky notes on a wall are awesome. They're a great deterrent to keep the PHBs from generating reports and dashboards for bothering people with KPIs.)
This little ceremony, and the associated firewall between two related but separate business functions, is, I think the heart and soul of what Scrum should be. It's the thing that sets up all the little firewalls and incentives that encourage business and dev to maintain a relationship that's more functional than dysfunctional. Everything else - sprints, story points, standup meetings, all that jazz - is just window dressing that some teams may or may not find makes that ceremony go more smoothly.
And if you can get a formal handoff like that in place, and get people to respect it, my (admittedly hopelessly idealistic) belief is that the rest of it gets easier to figure out. What's the correct scope and size of individual requests that the product people make of the dev team? Whatever size and scope best enables people to come out of the meeting feeling good about how it went.
But if everything's being jammed into one gimongous ticketing system, like all the ticketing system vendors seem to want you to do, you're doomed.
Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slightly OT thought, but related to ticket tracking systems and the idea of reduced backlogs: As we move more and more towards ubiquitous "Product Orgs," separate from engineering, I think we're seeing backlogs just explode in size at most places. People need to realize that a large engineering backlog has a lot of negative effects on the SDLC (& velocity) as a whole. I wish more people would embrace heavy-handed WIP…
yes. engineers almost always make poor product decisions if the customer is not also an engineering team, in my (vast) experience. this is because engineers aren't product experts. and if the customer is an engineering team, then engineers mostly make mediocre decisions, typically because of poor incentives (gaming story points). in every company i've been at that is larger than a handful of people that all know each…
>engineers almost always make poor product decisions
You seem to be misinterpreting my thoughts as being against the idea of a product manager role. That's not what I mean. I'm talking about product as a separate autonomous org with a CPO, versus embedded PMs reporting to EMs alongside the rest of the product development team. I have similar, though less strong, feelings about Design as a separate org as well, for many of the same reasons (communication overhead/bottlenecks).
With regard to backlog, there is actually some capacity planning math that can show that (unintuitively) backlog size negatively affects product delivery velocity. I'm not an expert there, I've just watched some internal tech talks about it in the past.
At a higher level, think about what happens when the business side requests a new feature, or a product change. What is the difference in terms of confidence of estimates that can be given if you have 20 tasks in the backlog, versus 200. Sure, for that one thing you can up the priority and jam it in above a bunch of other stuff. But then, once that starts happening to people where you prioritize a newer request above theirs, how does that affect their confidence in your planning ability on a longer timeline?
> in my (vast) experience
Lastly, maybe pump the brakes a bit here, boss. This statement doesn't make me trust you more, independent of your ideas. We're on a web forum, not in a board room.
Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a JIRA admin for a number of years for an organization that had a heavy QA workflow. It was all about making sure that every issue had an "owner," at any given time, a strict approval and verification process was followed, and that as much up-front data as possible was collected during the initial report. In my experience, unless the people entering the issues are paid, professional engineers, we'll never get t…
In my experience, it isn't Jira that people hate, it is the horrible rules and bureaucracy-ridden workflows that Jira allows an admin to implement. My team switched back to Jira after trying several other tools and we're pretty happy.
In my experience, it's both.
Jira is laggy as fuck and makes every interaction I have with it take 5 times as long as it needs to, or at least it has been in the two organizations that I've worked for that used it.