Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#51

Post by bberenberg » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 10:58 PM UTC

tom_mellior wrote: post #43

bberenberg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I run an Atlassian consulting company. In most scenarios I run into, "Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira" translates into "Someone set up Jira poorly and now we dislike using it". The thing is that if you replace Jira with any tool you can imagine, the statement will hold true. Jira isn't inherently a better or worse tool than most others out there. If you're at an or…

I think you missed the parent's "+ other related tools". My company uses Jira plus Confluence plus Bitbucket, which are each more or less shitty, but they are more or less interlinked. And that interlinking does actually add value. It doesn't matter whether Jira is inherently better or worse than anything else. It doesn't matter whether an isolated Jira installation could be replaced with something else. The network…

I did not miss that portion. I wasn't addressing moving away from Jira. I was saying if you don't have a choice in tool, and you're unhappy, then the path forward is to make the experience less bad by getting someone (more experienced/outside your political structure) than your current team to help you.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#52

Post by munchkinship » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:01 PM UTC

iba99 wrote: post #16

munkay wrote: post #6

great tool - congrats on the open beta! it wasn't immediately clear to me that the product is still in beta, and was unable to find any pricing information which threw me off. another question - is there a reason why Github isn't a support authentication method, considering that Github integration is a big part of the product? But the tool looks super interesting - going to try it out and intro it to our team!

Hey munkay- we're free for unlimited users. Principally, we believe teams shouldn’t have to be limited by user counts when deciding which project management system to use. Most are still clunky and cap at 10 users for free accounts- planning to have a free forever plan for unlimited users (much like Gitlab). Paid plans may include functionality for enterprise teams, full fledged integrations and/or smart features suc…

I feel this is how Jira took off initially in orgs when they had a really affordable unlimited user tier. When hooked into LDAP/AD, suddenly every employee in the company was a user.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#53

Post by iba99 » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:11 PM UTC

yboris wrote: post #32

iba99 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey munkay- we're free for unlimited users. Principally, we believe teams shouldn’t have to be limited by user counts when deciding which project management system to use. Most are still clunky and cap at 10 users for free accounts- planning to have a free forever plan for unlimited users (much like Gitlab). Paid plans may include functionality for enterprise teams, full fledged integrations and/or smart features suc…

Super amazing that you're aiming to have it free for unlimited users. I wonder if it's worth sharing prominently on the website a bit about the plan and an explanation of how you expect to fund this project. Without someone paying for the development it's not clear to anyone why this won't collapse and be closed in a month.

Good idea! We definitely need a pricing page to highlight the free forever plan.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#54

Post by iba99 » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:15 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #46

iba99 wrote: post #2

Hey folks. My co-founder and I started noodling on productivity tools a few years ago. After interviewing 250+ engineers and founders, we discovered that most project management software a) takes a lot of time to configure b) is not built for cross-functional teams and c) takes away focus from the release cycle. The status quo is that engineers spend precious time wading through tickets, and EMs + PMs continue to lac…

>most project management software a) takes a lot of time to configure Every project management software will have some reasonable defaults that can get you started in no time. The problem is that every company (and certainly any company with more than a handful of employees), at some point, will want to adjust the tool to their use case and that's where the complexity comes in. If you can't adjust things like statuse…

This. This is what we think about, constantly. How do we maintain the low to zero config teams ask for flexibility. We are a few apple engineers on the founding team (I'm not), and they really want to follow the approach set by Mac OS. Overall, Tara won't be for everyone, but it's a fine line between balancing the intuitive simple design and use case adjustments/workflows. Could be considered a matrix with several trade-offs.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#55

Post by iba99 » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:22 PM UTC

lidHanteyk wrote: post #3

Hi. I worry that this sort of tool does not benefit engineering very much; in my experience, Jira and other time-management tools are used to allow product ownership and management to request ever-sillier features, while penalizing engineers who do not make themselves legible with constant status updates. When designing Tara, how did you account for the power differential between the employees who will be using Tara…

So one thing we're working hard to do- is minimize the status updates required. For example- we built a simple home/dashboard where statuses can be updated with one click and individuals can focus on their priority tasks during the sprint.

We feel strongly about minimizing the amount of time spent wading through tickets and updating statuses. Currently working on a few other ideas/features that are related to status changes based on source control. Stay tuned.

As for power differential, the question is how do you instill a sense of camaraderie in individual engineers, and enable managers to load sprints with actual team data vs subjective measures. We're still working on improving this front - but so far - our "home" feature has been liked by both engineers and engineering managers.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#56

Post by sideproject » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:23 PM UTC

I've been using clubhouse for myself and it's pretty much what I need in terms of "advanced to-do list" but "not as heavy as JIRA".

What I'm more interested in is how project management software like this keeps popping up and I genuinely wonder what the rationale is?

We use JIRA, Trello and Asana at work and between three of them, yeah, things are working. How much more do we want out of them? Not much. Let's just get on with actual work.

But I must be missing something - some market research, some user research where there is a big unmet need or problem that none of these tools are currently solving and not just in "missing a feature" way, but at a fundamental level where it justifies an entrepreneur to jump in and create an entire software from scratch.

I'm not in the domain, so I obviously don't have the data. I know lots of people complain about JIRA (including me), but my complaints don't warrant me to move.

Maybe these companies are targeting "new" users? New companies, new teams, people who are starting projects anew and looking for project management software?

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#57

Post by lifebeyondfife » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:27 PM UTC

discreteevent wrote: post #50

lifebeyondfife wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a manager I follow two principles that help me to prioritise tasks for a weekly sprint. First, every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two. So it's not about not trusting the development team. It's about understanding the tradeoffs and how the delivery date will be affected. Second, how well can you predict what you can achieve as a developer in one day vs one hundred days? The estimat…

> every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two You forgot about quality. It can blow the other 3 out of the water.

That's non-negotiable to me. You can make a short-term decision e.g. this implementation will only scale for the next month, but automated testing, clean code, other standards must be maintained.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#58

Post by lifebeyondfife » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:46 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #47

lifebeyondfife wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a manager I follow two principles that help me to prioritise tasks for a weekly sprint. First, every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two. So it's not about not trusting the development team. It's about understanding the tradeoffs and how the delivery date will be affected. Second, how well can you predict what you can achieve as a developer in one day vs one hundred days? The estimat…

Sorry, teams can't be only devs. That's IT or something, and implies that tech isn't the business. Team has to include 'the business', as in, voice of customer, features lens, in those tradeoff prioritizations along with what do we engineer, and what's the truth of where we are on the field, for delivering what satisfies the customer and our constraints. // Hat tip Rands in Repose. As for "Ultimately it's not about t…

The team I work in has a product manager, a designer, a cloud infrastructure automation engineer, as well as seven software engineers. Together we collectively advocate for our users and help with those tradeoffs.

> As for "Ultimately it's not about trust, it's about

> accountability and predictability" that's precisely

> the characterization I reject.

How do you know if you're effective? Perhaps it's a difference from one company to another but I don't think it's unfair that my manager (and others dependent on my team's output) want to scrutinse my decisions, and the outcomes of the team.

Likewise, I can scrutinise the choices of engineers with weekly sprints, to ensure the goal is hit i.e. a timely release with flexible features, or a feature complete product that might overrun.

JIRA doesn't magic effectiveness, agreed. It can help show the truth of the decisions taken toward a goal and how work is progressing. I'm not advocating waterfall (any estimate of "this fully specced feature should be finished in two months" is pure fiction) but JIRA or other similar products can work to let managers know ahead of time, "We're not going to finish this by our initial estimated delivery date." That's a useful tool.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#59

Post by puppybits » Fri, May 01, 2020, 12:29 AM UTC

techntoke wrote: post #27

derektwong wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our Github integration is a two-way sync, so that you can import any open GitHub issues into Tara as Tara tasks. If you update the corresponding the Tara task, the corresponding GitHub issues are also updated, so you can certainly keep using the GitHub issues. The main benefit of using Tara is that it provides the team a much better way of plan upcoming sprints, and the system also pulls in GitHub PRs to eliminate an…

So no self-hosted option like Phabricator?

We still have a lot of rapid development to have self-hosted at this time.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

#60

Post by Firehawke » Fri, May 01, 2020, 12:50 AM UTC

sideproject wrote: post #56

I've been using clubhouse for myself and it's pretty much what I need in terms of "advanced to-do list" but "not as heavy as JIRA". What I'm more interested in is how project management software like this keeps popping up and I genuinely wonder what the rationale is? We use JIRA, Trello and Asana at work and between three of them, yeah, things are working. How much more do we want out of them? Not much. Let's just ge…

My immediate thoughts are "Yeah, it's working well for you, but I imagine there are considerable numbers of people out there who aren't happy with the existing systems and want something different to fit a different workflow"

It's like a Git client. Sure, you can do it right from the commandline, but some people want something a little different-- and that's why you get clients like GitKraken with different ways of visualizing things.