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GitHub Issues-only project management

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Re: GitHub Issues-only project management

#51

Post by bhauer »

This issues-only approach, or what I call just task-tracking, is my favorite small-team development process. By small, I mean 2 to 8 people or so.

I resonate with this blog entry because I agree that the visualizations that more sophisticated tools provide are low-value distractions that ultimately cause more problems than they solve. The most important thing for collaborative development, in my opinion, is a clear, accurate, singular definition of work to be done. From there, you can prioritize and adapt as needed, but spending inordinate amounts of time with visualizations (often to satisfy some non-technical stakeholders) is wasteful allocation of resource time.

My own thinking on task trackers: https://tiamat.tsotech.com/task-tracking

For example, a golden rule of mine is that you should only have one authoritative system used for task-tracking. Any additional system or tool will inevitably lead to confusion about priorities and lost efficiency, despite the appearances to the contrary that lead you to add a tool in the first place.

Re: GitHub Issues-only project management

#52

Post by eezing »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #37

Nope. Having worked in a shop that used GitLab issues for project management, I've come to realize GitHub-style issue trackers work if all your project management boils down to creating and tracking bite-sized blobs of work. It stops being sufficient when you need to actually plan ahead . FWIW, so does Trello. Couple reasons why: - Issues are flat. Work breaks down into a tree. And no, "epic / ticket / checkboxes in…

Sounds like you spend a lot of time managing your PM tool.

Re: GitHub Issues-only project management

#53

Post by technics256 »

codesternews wrote: post #47
quesodev wrote: post #23

Having run several engineering teams (15-20 people), I used this approach extensively. It meant one less place to go and one less tool to use. I liked this approach so much, I also wanted to use Github Issues for internal and external customer support instead of having another help desk tool involved. I created https://hubdesk.io/ as a side project to do this. Forward your support emails to HubDesk and it creates a G…

Not related but your landing page is good. May I know what template/how did you build it. Thanks

I'm not OP but I can spot these anywhere now. It's from www.tailwindui.com

Re: GitHub Issues-only project management

#54

Post by TeMPOraL »

simonw wrote: post #45
TeMPOraL wrote: post #37

Nope. Having worked in a shop that used GitLab issues for project management, I've come to realize GitHub-style issue trackers work if all your project management boils down to creating and tracking bite-sized blobs of work. It stops being sufficient when you need to actually plan ahead . FWIW, so does Trello. Couple reasons why: - Issues are flat. Work breaks down into a tree. And no, "epic / ticket / checkboxes in…

"Issues are independent. Properly broken down, work in a project has dependencies" A trick I use a lot is to open a "tracking issue" and then link to it from other dependent issues by mentioning its #ID in those issue's descriptions. The tracking issue automatically shows the open/close status of those other issues, which means I can see at a glance if all of the dependent issues have been completed. Here's an exampl…

We've done something like this too. It worked well to keep track of related issues, particularly during regular reviews. It turned out insufficient when we had to plan ahead for ~6-12 months of work on polishing "version 1.0" (~300 existing tickets that needed to be pruned, reprioritized and otherwise rearranged) and building "version 2.0" (proper work-breakdown task of a complex project).

Our PM tried to handle this challenge for a while, by writing scripts against GitLab API. This eventually turned out insufficient, so the PM, myself and another coworker set out to find a project management tool that actually does project management. It's after extensive discussions and search that we figured out none of the well-known work tracking products in software development fit the bill.

Best easily-accessible options we've found were: MS Project (if you're on Windows, which we weren't), Jira (if you hire a person full-time just to manage it) and YouTrack from JetBrains (if you hire a person full-time just to script it). There are other options in the corporate PM space, but we didn't get to explore those as a startup (and eventually we've all left the company).

Re: GitHub Issues-only project management

#55

Post by wingmanjd »

We're planning a migration from Atlassian suite to the Gitlab ecosystem, but one item that I can't seem to replicate is the issue/ ticket workflow of a JIRA ticket. We have a semi-involved workflow that covers most of the software development lifecycle: initial requirements gathering, approvals, coding development, code reviews, UAT approvals, prod deployment approvals etc.

How do you handle this sort of thing with just Git(hub|lab) issues?

Re: GitHub Issues-only project management

#56

Post by TeMPOraL »

eezing wrote: post #52
TeMPOraL wrote: post #37

Nope. Having worked in a shop that used GitLab issues for project management, I've come to realize GitHub-style issue trackers work if all your project management boils down to creating and tracking bite-sized blobs of work. It stops being sufficient when you need to actually plan ahead . FWIW, so does Trello. Couple reasons why: - Issues are flat. Work breaks down into a tree. And no, "epic / ticket / checkboxes in…

Sounds like you spend a lot of time managing your PM tool.

Nah. There's not much to manage in a proper PM tool itself. But you have to know the basic concepts (like critical path) and understand the problem space (e.g. tasks form DAGs, not sequences). Also, project management is in big part planning the work, not doing the work. Issue trackers help with the latter, not the former.

Re: GitHub Issues-only project management

#57

Post by zikzak »

simonw wrote: post #41
dan-robertson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think anything that reduces the number of different places that information or discussion may happen is good. The thought of having a mix of code/code review/wiki/other wiki/email/chat/list archives/jira/shared inbox/trello is not appealing to me. There’s some continuum where adding a system changes things from good to annoying and I think my own feelings put that place more towards the “fewer systems” end than whe…

Tool proliferation is definitely a problem, but at larger organizations I'm not sure how feasible it is to keep everyone using the same small set of tools. At my last large employer I ended up putting together a custom search engine that searched across a bunch of different places where important stuff ended up - Google Docs and GitHub Wikis and Markdown-in-GitHub and Confluence and Salesforce Support and a mailing l…

We used to use Unfuddle for source control and issues/PM then went to self hosted TFS but kept issues and pm in Unfuddle. Then we decided that was working so well for Dev, everyone should use it. But people didn't like Unfuddle. So now we have Asana. Everyone but Dev likes it, there's no ticket numbers, and it's confusing but at least the stakeholders are using it?

Re: GitHub Issues-only project management

#58

Post by wereHamster »

jrockway wrote: post #20

Not super convinced. First off, I am not sure why people like Kanban boards so much. It seems like the most inefficient way to display issues possible -- you can't see the details, the title gets cut off into lines of 4 letters each, and you still have horizontal and vertical scroll bars. The idea of Kanban was that if you didn't have space for a card, you wouldn't take on the task. To some extent, this can work for…

How does what you used at Google compare to Linear?

Re: GitHub Issues-only project management

#59

Post by antipaul »

I wish. I’m at Big Corp where key project collaborators and stakeholders are wildly non technical and there’s no way to use GitHub issues.

They mostly use only email.

What is a more accessible alternative?

I’ve been trying google docs. Thoughts?

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