GitHub Issues-only project management

1. Would I have control over the "From" name and address for emails that HubDesk sends to users?

2. Do email replies from users get added as comments on the issue?

3. When an issue is created, does HubDesk send a confirmation to the user so they can do follow-up replies even before the rep has done an outward-facing reply?

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 task" is not enough, that's barely two and a half levels. Compare with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_breakdown_structure [0].

- Issues are independent. Properly broken down, work in a project has dependencies. That turns a tree of tasks into a directed acyclic graph of tasks - work items depend on other items, often items from different areas in the WBS.

- Issues don't schedule well. Most issue trackers I've seen don't support simultaneously entering planned start/end dates, actual start/end dates, and actual work being done. This means they can't be effectively used to estimate the length of the project, and update that estimate as the project progresses. Forget about any auto-scheduling.

There's a reason why old-school PMs love their Gantt charts so much - they properly reflect the graph-like nature of work, and they let you see the information crucial for planning at a glance.

In my opinion, any system that doesn't support entering DAGs of tasks with planned manual and automatic dates (e.g. "this task will take ~5 days, and starts when that other task ends"), and doesn't allow you to compute the critical path, is not a project management tool, but a glorified TODO list. A good PM tool does what I've outlined above, plus it lets you easily run what-if analysis - that is, play around with estimates, resource availability, task ordering, to explore the space of possible project plans and possible failure modes.

So, in my opinion, neither GitHub/GitLab issues, nor Trello or other Kanban boards, are useful for PM work. I've heard that properly configured Jira just might be. MS Project is a good one, if you ignore its clunky UI and propensity to randomly lock up for no reason.

--

[0] - Even where the Wiki says "For most projects a hierarchy of two to four levels will suffice.", this is in context of "lowest level of detail of the WBS should be longer than a single reporting period", which would be typically a month or more. Tickets in the issue tracker are thus a level below that. So, to properly break a project down, you need ~2-4 levels of structure above your tickets.

GitHub Issues has exactly the set of features that I need. I'm confident I understand 100% of the functionality that it offers, and I use all of that functionality.

(The "GitHub Projects" stuff hasn't stuck for me, but that's presented as an optional layer on top of issues so it's easy to ignore it.)

I also love how programmable Issues are. The APIs (both REST and GraphQL) are easy to use, and the options for automation using GitHub Actions are exciting, though I've not done much with them yet.

I also like having an exit plan for this kind of tool, and the API means I can easily get all of my issues data out again. I wrote a tool called github-to-sqlite which exports my data to SQLite and I use it to build a SQLite database that brings together data from many of my projects so I can search and query it in one place - demo here: https://github-to-sqlite.dogsheep.net/