

My minimalistic agile issue tracker - zserge
http://zserge.com/blog/agile-issue-tracker.html

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Cieplak
Because of client requirements, my team uses Sharepoint. What an
overcomplicated mess. For information security reasons, Gmail is blocked. So,
even though we would want to use a google spreadsheet on the side for tracking
tasks and issues that might not merit posting to our client's sharepoint site,
we can't. To replicate this functionality, we occasionally collaboratively
edit a spreadsheet on the LAN. Everybody hates Sharepoint, but they still use
it because it's what they know. I think the best way to get a foot into this
market would be to build an open-source replacement for Sharepoint, and build
a business around deployments and consulting. Not an easy task. There are many
tools out there that do one or two of the things that Sharepoint does, but few
of these tools integrate with one another. Perhaps part of the reason
Sharepoint sucks so hard is that it gives you all of these things out of the
box. If you could build a modular system for all of this functionality, and
market it successfully, there would be tons of businesses wanting to buy your
services. Granted, services companies don't scale the way that product
companies do, but do a handful of enterprise deployments and then retire. I
envision such a system being like Wordpress with various plug-ins. Make the
complexity of the software match the complexity of the problem you are trying
to solve, without introducing incidental complexity.

~~~
MartinCron
If you think using Sharepoint is an overcomplicated mess, you should try
having to develop for it sometime.

~~~
Cieplak
Unfortunately I have to get my hands dirty with it every now and then.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_Application_Marku...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_Application_Markup_Language)

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sergiotapia
I use Asana for this purpose.

It's very easy to create a free account and just get down to brass tax. It's
made by former Facebook engineers, check it out!

www.asana.com

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jack-r-abbit
I work in a small team. A former PM for some reason started using an Excel
spreadsheet for ticket tracking (we use _ticket_ rather than _issue_ or _task_
). The nightmare of constantly emailing new versions of the spreadsheet and
trying to keep it current and merging in others' changes... ugh. But we
recently converted that method to a Google Docs spreadsheet and it seems to be
working out nicely. We don't have a ton of tickets so it is pretty easily
manageable.

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bdunn
While I like this, the problem is that there's no way to correlate discussions
and attachments with a particular task when using a spreadsheet.

The saving grace of most issue trackers is that they usually come with comment
threads, which makes trying to wade through email to figure out the context of
a particular task pretty challenging.

~~~
mattyfo
Agreed, my number one gripe with spreadsheets as development trackers is that
you can't have a discussion around a task.

As a product manager I might write something down and it makes perfect sense
to me but not the developer. Hence there needs to be a place for a discussion.

While a spreadsheet might feel simple, I'm argue that there are other simple
solutions (PivotalTracker) that get this thing "right"; even for a team of
one.

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Kilimanjaro
One man shop here, this is what I do:

    
    
        - Fix header css
        - Design new logo
        x Fix api bug
        - Test new db
    

Just a simple text file, move up/down by priority, add dates for completed
stuff and more.

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jdlshore
The real minimalistic, agile approach is a magnetic whiteboard with index
cards.

I'm not trying to be snarky here. A whiteboard has high resolution (300+ dpi),
tons of real estate (8 feet by 4 feet), a haptic interface (you can carry the
cards back to your desk), and constantly broadcasts status information.

Why people would sacrifice that for some crappy 30" monitor mystifies me.

(Okay, it doesn't really mystify me. It's necessary for non-colocated teams.
But with rare exceptions, that just makes electronic "agile" tools a
palliative cure.)

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sciurus
For a single developer tracking their own work this may be fine, because you
can keep the entire spreadsheet and the details of the issues in your head.
However, this doesn't scale. I recently worked somewhere that used a couple
Google Spreadsheet to track around twenty people working on around ten closely
related projects. Moving to Redmine, while resisted by the manager types that
didn't want to learn new software, dramatically improved our ability to get
things done.

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sathish316
Gitwall is a minimalistic task/issue tracker for all your Github projects
<http://gitwall.heroku.com> (plug).

It is intended to have no features other than task name and todo-doing-done
for personal projects.

