I've used Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Trello, Asana, Zenhub, and other project management software that was written internally. In my opinion, based on my needs on every project I've worked on, I've yet to use a project management software that did anything better than a simple Trello board or the like. At the end of the day, I want a list of tasks, a way to indicate the status on the task, a discussion section for the ta…
As to the article, I agree with a lot of the author's points. The author talks about lack of features for collaboration. and I agree. What's wrong with the comment systems in Trello or Jira? I think it's that they don't model how people actually collaborate, which often goes something like this: (1) I have a question for someone else on the team, (2) that person answers or passes it to someone else who can, (3) repeat until I've got the answer, (4) reflect the answer somewhere (designs, description, etc.), (5) consider the matter resolved. Many of these might be going on in parallel, and the back-and-forth is often asynchronous. A single comment stream just doesn't lend itself to this kind of collaboration. Neither does Slack where, as the author says, requests for follow-up easily get lost.
The extreme flexibility of the "circles" is interesting. On the one hand, it's nice to give control over to the users and let them model whatever use case they have. On the other, a tool that's too open-ended may overwhelm users with options when they should really be focusing on dev. (Of course, that could be solved with intelligent default templates, or something along those lines.) I'm curious to read others thoughts about that.