
Ask HN: What tools do you use for project management? - dtnewman
I&#x27;m looking into various tools for software development project management (Trello, Jira, Asana, etc.) and I&#x27;d like to get feedback on tools that you use and what you do or don&#x27;t like about those tools.
======
cauterized
For a software team of a handful of people or more, nothing holds a candle to
JIRA. It's a little intimidating to new users, and the setup time is
ridiculous. I have one or two nitpicks about things like the unavailability of
conditional logic in some aspects of workflows. But if you're responsible for
_managing_ the project, nothing beats being able to use your issue database as
an actual database. And JIRA can be configured to reflect anything from the
loosest zero-overhead startuppy kanban process (basically a UI almost exactly
like Trello) to the most rigid and calcified enterprise process - and anything
in between.

For small backlogs and non-technical users, Trello can be effective, but
mature software projects tend to accumulate thousands of open bugs and feature
requests and things-we'd-like-to-do-better-someday-if-we-ever-have-the-time.
Trello's cards aren't skimmable, and you can't sort and filter them by
multiple dimensions the way I'd prefer. There's no way to group a bunch of
cards into something like an epic. And I still haven't figured out in Trello
how to assign a card to one person but have other people subscribe to updates
on it. It's ok to be the engineer assigned work via Trello, but it's awful to
be the project manager trying to manage a backlog in Trello.

Asana is good for personal to-dos and tiny projects, but it's awful if you
need to track the status of an issue through multiple steps of a process. It's
a nearly perfect platform for GTD lists. But GTD is not a system for
communication among multiple people.

Finally, both Asana and Trello are missing unique, persistent, human-readable
issue IDs that can be used to quickly refer to and pull up a specific item out
of hundreds or thousands that may have similar keywords. It seems like a small
thing, but is a huge deal dealer for me because it breaks communication.

As for Basecamp, which someone else mentioned, I find it effective for
communicating about a project with clients, but not for tracking the internal
status of a large number of tasks for some of the same reasons outlined above.

~~~
poletopole
I've tried Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and JIRA as well. JIRA's issue IDs are
worth it alone for me. I use them to name git branches. The one thing I miss
about Asana was infinitely nestable tasks. Trello was a mess and Basecamp was
too restrictive on how many open projects you can have.

------
rohan404
We initially used PivotalTracker for managing our development teams, and
Trello to get a high level overview of project status as well as for planning.
We're currently working on building our own version of PivotalTracker using a
fork of CM42
([https://github.com/Codeminer42/cm42-central](https://github.com/Codeminer42/cm42-central))
for internal use.

------
marcbos
Tough choice because there's a clash of personal preference, and role
preference. JIRA is great for dev management, but it's hostile to
business/design folk, and even developers tend to prefer lightweight github
issues. Was tired of fighting, so went and built a sync tool to combine/switch
Trello, JIRA, Asana, GitHub, etc seamlessly. Maybe it can help
[https://unito.io](https://unito.io)

------
rkv
Our team uses LiquidPlanner but it requires a lot of training and workshops to
start using it right. Devs within the team struggle with the initial learning
curve so we integrated Bugzilla and it works really well. The biggest feature
we rely on from LP is predictive estimate ranges. For teams relying on the
software releases of other teams the managers of each can see different
uncertainty estimates and plan accordingly.

------
matharmin
Started using Clubhouse a few months ago, and finding it way better for
software projects than anything else we tried. We're a team of 10 people, and
it works well for the developers and product manager.

In the past we've used Pivotal Tracker and Trello, but neither was a good fit.
Also looked at Jira, but the interface had too much overhead (slow and
required too many clicks to do anything).

------
stephenr
Basecamp is the least terrible I've used, because it has simple task/todo
lists with conversations (comments) on each item, due dates, assignments etc.

Unfortunately I find their ux/ui painful to use, everything is a custom
widget, and seems painfully slow from here (s.e. Asia on not fantastic adsl)

------
tabeth
Visual Studio Team Services is a pretty all-in-one solution. The only thing
I'd like it to have a vastly simpler non-technical view. Something like
Trello, as a front-end. They try to do this but imo it's not very effective.

VSTS and Jira and basically equivalent in my experience.

~~~
anotheryou
Regarding VSTS: The swimlaning of items drives me crazy.

I also could not manage to filter for undone items, that are assigned to me or
have a parent assigned to me. (the parent thing is the difficulty)

------
namechecksout
One tool that hasn't been mantioned yet is waffle.io, it uses simple Kanban
system and comes handy in terms of connecting issues to GitHub. It has the tag
system similar to JIRA's one and provides Scrum tools like backlog section and
burndown chart.

------
mrits
I used to use Pivotal Tracker, was forced into using Jira. Honestly Jira
ecosystem is not that bad as long as you don't have people passionate about
process customizing everything.

------
ckok
Phabricator. We use it for code review. Tasks. Kanban and source hosting.
Better than anything else I know

------
mikaelf
We use Asana, and it's wonderful!

------
PrimalPlasma
Trello is the worst. Unusable.

Use Pivotal Tracker.

~~~
adamhepner
Holy hell, totally forgot about that one. Thanks!

