GitHub Issues-only project management

My last company had a change of leadership and dumped Jira for Github Issues, since we were already paying for Github and everybody hated Jira anyway. We made extensive use of Github Actions with it as well.

Worked great, would recommend.

Be nice if the new GitHub issues got out of beta, it looks like that should be able to whittle down 90% of the use cases of Trello and Jira and be simple and usable for personal issue management.

Not as good. Org-wide planning was totally out of scope, but hotlists were great for organizing cycles, quarters, triage, etc. Individuals had the ability to look at a hotlist and decide "what's the #1 thing to work on right now", which I guess is the most important thing. The tool also made a lot of mistakes that new tools don't -- separate severity and priority levels, canned resolutions ("working as intended" was a meme), etc.

Avery has some thoughts on the system near the end of his Epic Treatise: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20171213#slide38

+1 Whilst I still use other tools too, Github Issues-only can help provide useful focus by limiting the options available to PMs and others.

I came to much the same conclusion (and kinda expected to), but I did find merits in the GitLab Issues approach.

As an experiment this year, for a more reactive phase of engineering in the startup, I experimented with using GitLab Issues and Board to track all engineering & operations work.

I redid the GitLab Labels to have two sets: Kanban state, and color-coded Urgency. Each issue had exactly one from each set.

I used the "blocks/blocked-by" issue linking to do a crude and poorly-visualized approximation of Gantt task dependencies.

For tracking periodic tasks that had a human in the loop (e.g., run this daily data acquisition tool, spend 5 minutes actually checking the infrastructure dashboard, periodic offline backups), they stuck in the Doing Kanban column, and the Due Date changed to the next day they should be run. This worked well, except for one unexpected performance issue: the Issues page for a daily periodic task that included a daily commit and time spend, and occasion comment... was surprisingly slow to fully load (without measuring, after a few months, it was maybe up to 10 seconds, while all those event entries entries were being loaded). It often slows the daily task, which is something that makes people avoid/resent tools, but I imagine speeding it up might be viable.

I also used the "/spend" in the Comments to track individual time spends. (I did the spends only myself, as an experiment; I don't know whether it would go over well with new hires, especially before we'd established unusual trust that it wouldn't be used for play-to-the-metrics nor against anyone.)

The integration with CM workflow is a win for developers and project managers (whether or not they're the same people). The performance is so-so. (For example, one "urgency::

What might make it really-really win for managing projects that are plannable (rather than situated action on a weekly basis) is a solid Gantt view on the same model, plus maybe adding just a little scheduling to the model.

(If GitLab doesn't do it, this project management view could possibly be third-party integration wrt GitLab, like what Instagantt does as a layer over Asana. I'd almost suggest it to Instagannt, though hopefully a bit faster to use, so that project management isn't slowed by tool performance.)