
Ask HN: Do you need a new Issue Tracking and Project Management tool? - andreygrehov
I&#x27;ve been working for quite a while on a new issue tracking&#x2F;project management tool. The goal was to make it as a native cross-platform application (think Slack), with potential offline support.<p>Now I&#x27;ve been demotivated a little bit after making some more research on this whole topic, as there are so many Jiras and Asanas out there, that making another one is like starting a new Facebook - at least, these are my thoughts as of right now.<p>To either confirm or deny the conclusion, I decided to simply ask community.<p>Is anyone looking to replace existing project management and issue tracking software with something else?
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cvburgess
I think it depends on who you ask.

Developers I know typically like something simple, flat, and issue-focused.
Think GH issues.

PMs tend to want more feature rich tools with advanced reporting and
customizable views. Think salesforce.

Product owners (I haven't had many) just want to know "are we there yet?" and
will rarely open any tool or learn how they work - they just badger the PM via
email or in meetings.

My problem isn't that there aren't tools that I like, its that there aren't a
lot of tools that can be "all things to all people."

If a tool was built on something simple (GH Issues) and added a layer of
complexity on top for PMs I think you'd have a winner. Waffle (waffle.io) is
going in that direction, though they aren't heavy in the PM tooling area
yet(?)

~~~
dudul
> Product owners (I haven't had many) just want to know "are we there yet?"
> and will rarely open any tool or learn how they work - they just badger the
> PM via email or in meetings.

A little off-topic, but that's definitely not what I expect from a PO. On the
contrary, a PO should be highly involved in the tool used to track the
features that _they_ have requested and defined, the bugs that _they_ have
identified, etc.

Most of my career has been at smaller startups so maybe product owners have a
different role in larger organizations.

~~~
cvburgess
I have seen that in smaller companies - especially startups. The closer I get
to a large, enterprise environment, the more the PO resembles a sales person
who is in meetings all day. Not actively using any PM tooling.

------
jedberg
If you ask the community like this, you'll probably get a lot of "yes"
answers, because very few people like the tools they have. But it probably
won't help you make a good decision.

Asking people how they feel generally isn't a great way to evaluate your
product -- you have to build it and see how they act. You can ask potential
customers what features they would like to help guide you, but I wouldn't
necessarily add or cut features based on their answers.

The best way to tell if someone needs your products is to just get it out
there and see if people actually use it.

Some anecdotes: I was in a focus group once about cell phones, many years ago.
They asked us all if we would want a camera in our phone. All of us said no,
it wouldn't be worth the extra expense, because we couldn't think of a single
thing we'd use a camera on a phone for. It's a good thing Nokia didn't listen
to us!

On reddit, check out the /r/ideasfortheadmins subreddit. It is filled with
ideas users think they want, including features reddit used to have that no
one used.

What I'm saying can be summarized by the (incorrectly attributed to Ford)
quote, "If you had asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'a
faster horse'".

------
mfisher87
Yes.

My opinion is that nothing that currently exists really solves the whole
problem of information management well (aside from git). Most teams mash
together three or four different solutions for strongly related problems. Some
teams are as bad as: gitolite for central code repo, a bug tracker for
managing issues, a spreadsheet for managing who works on what features, a
_separate_ bug tracker for issues found in QA, personally-managed to-do lists
for each developer, a Trello, a dozen bespoke reports for status to upper
management, and all team communication goes through e-mail. Yes, slack and
github would replace about 3 of these, but you still have 5 solutions to the
same general problem -- what needs to be done and who is doing (or will do)
it, how, and when.

Obviously this is a very hard problem, or it would be solved now. I have tried
for a long time to decide what I think would be a good solution, and for all
intents and porpoises, I have gotten nowhere.

I really like the approach Trello has taken -- provide a simple, flexible
concept and let users build it all from there. Obviously Trello doesn't tick
all the boxes, but I wonder if some other deceptively simple idea can
accomplish it.

~~~
iheartmemcache
Atlassian is cheap (like a dollar a user per year, per product) for startups
(up to 10 engineers IIRC - so lets say if you have less than 20-25 employees)
and basically does everything from high level PPM all the way down to code-
reviews. I've played with all of the major (and maybe half of the minor)
solutions and Atlassian wins hands down. (They bought Hipchat, so you have
your Slack integration -- Confluence as your wiki -- Bitbucket is now feature
parity with Github -- and its all on premise. Watch this[1] 3 minute promo to
see the tooling. And if its extendable/integrates into basically everything
(see this:
[https://youtu.be/YdHtj0ymMqY?t=22](https://youtu.be/YdHtj0ymMqY?t=22). Oh
yeah it has all those Kanban Trello features too). It was a RAM hog back in
the day (mid 2000s) but thats a non-issue now. And re: licensing fees, if you
make it past their startup-pricing, the software has delivered enough value to
you that spending a few thousand an engineer a year is literally the cost of
one day of labor for a FTE.

There are other alternatives with pretty decent ecosystems if you don't want
to pay the $10 dollars to get 10 seats for Atlassian (which again, I think
youd be crazy not to at least demo it). RE: OSS - Even with a "crappy" 8 year
old Redmine install, you're given a git master remote to push to, a document
share, bug tracking, and a whole lot more out of the box. GitLab also has a
really integrated free set of tools which is a huge huge RAM hog in itself,
but it's free and has eye candy so you can probably get management to sign
off.

[https://youtu.be/8KPoZ5g8NqU](https://youtu.be/8KPoZ5g8NqU)

------
adamwong246
Well, I'm "building my own lightsaber" in that respect. So yes.

Productivity tooling is a very crowded space. And building you own issue
tracker is the very height of yak-shaving. That being said, there's always
room for new ideas. I don't _need_ a new tool but I'm building one nonetheless
because the solutions that exist now, IMHO, miss out on some really neat
ideas. So my side project is more of an experiment, trying to tease out some
new UX ideas, rather than a utility to aid in building other projects.

If you need to build some other thing, just use existing tools. Focus on the
real work, not the "meta-work." If you think you can make headway into the
crowded arena of existing solutions with some out-of-the-box idea, go for it.
But don't mix up the two, cause you'll never get anything done... which is the
opposite effect a Project Management tool should cause.

TL;DR I'm always looking for new tools. But don't get stuck yak shaving.

------
jordanlev
Issue trackers seem to be the most prevalant "scratch your own itch" project
for programmers (well, after time trackers). I'm sure there's always a new way
to approach a problem, but be aware that it is an over-saturated market with a
large trail of abandoned/out-of-businessed solutions in its wake.

EDIT: Not trying to dissuade you, I guess what I mean is that if you're going
to do it you should do it because you're in love with the idea and think you
have something new to offer (and can clearly elucidate the problems that other
systems don't solve, but yours does)... not because it seems like an easy way
to make money. (Which I guess holds true for any business.)

~~~
exelius
Hell, Jira started this way and has become a bloated, uber-customizable piece
of software over the decade since.

In a market like this, your company will not be a unicorn. If you ever make a
billion dollar valuation, it will be the way Atlasssian did it - after many
years of grinding through blood, sweat and tears. So you need to really love
the problem and be passionate about serving your customers because that's the
ONLY way you can win.

------
joshuaduffy
The major thing for me is proper search and filtering tools. Jira and TFS seem
to get this right with JQL and Queries respectively, for most non-technical
people however, they seem to be quite daunting.

I think the other main thing that could be improved is integration with other
tracking software.

I work in testing. The main thing I see is projects using more than one
project or defect management tool. I feel is an area that could be seriously
disrupted.

For example... One project I worked, we had the developers (external company)
using JIRA, whilst we used Smartbear ALM.

So I ended up writing something that used both the JIRA and ALM API's to save
me updating two systems. Imagine if this functionality was out of the box?

~~~
iheartmemcache
What sort of problems are those non-technical people trying to solve w/r/t
JIRA. I.e., what do they find daunting, how badly does it obstruct their
workflow, etc. (I've written a decent amount of JQL but it's hard for me to
imagine what a non-technical average user of JIRA would be trying to
accomplish.)

Off topic but I've used a lot of ALM's, never Smartbear. A few sentences on
how you like it compared to other products would be great!

------
abbottry
The largest issue I've run into with respect to issue tracking is making it
accessible and easy to use/understand for the entire team. Non-technical team
members don't have GH accounts, they don't know if what they are seeing is a
bug, they don't know if its already been reported (because they don't
understand the root cause), always seem to be afraid of doing it wrong.

Further, a tool that tracks the resolution of issues into a simple to read
'This was just deployed' or some kind of digest would be insanely useful. It's
not an easy task, but so often someone is waiting for a fix, or waiting for a
feature, and then gets upset or something gets overlooked because they didn't
know the feature/bug was deployed.

Something simple, with an app-store style approach to customization could be
really handy.

------
curun1r
If you're looking to make it native with offline support, there's one feature
that I think would get you a ton of traction among developers. Use a
git/mercurial branch as the underlying storage mechanism. Being able to clone
a repo and get the full issue tracking history would be pretty cool and a
storage mechanism with offline and built-in audit tracking is a non-trivial
part of the problem, so using something that's as proven as the major DVCSs
are would help make solving that issue easier.

But more importantly, it's a hook. It's what would differentiate you from
other issue trackers. It's distributed issue tracking that allows you to take
advantage of all the infrastructure that's been built up around the underlying
DVCSs. Right off the bat, you have a reason for your project to exist.

------
exelius
> I've been working for quite a while on a new issue tracking/project
> management tool. The goal was to make it as a native cross-platform
> application (think Slack), with potential offline support.

I don't know that this is a huge benefit in a work tracking tool. These
features are useful in Slack because it's a real-time communication platform.
Work tracking systems are more ok with being asynchronous - there's usually a
business function that performs synchronization whether or not your work
tracking system does, so having everything update across multiple cached
versions in real-time is less meaningful.

I would focus on the process - it sounds like you're just building something
to build something. What in the process of software development is broken? Is
building a new tool the right solution?

------
golergka
Yes. I have worked with Trello (too lightweight), Github issues (too bare),
Jira (a huge monster no one is bothering to configure right) and others.

In the end, I want an open-source tool with a focus on easy customization with
plugins and custom solutions through code itself.

~~~
busterarm
This.

There aren't enough of these, actually. Every new web app seems to be in the
SaaS model. Frankly where I'm at is too small to justify the spend (our
content team uses and loves Basecamp but our three-person dev team absolutely
hates it). We just want something to run internally within our team.

All of the open-source tools are quite old and a pain to set up.

------
organsnyder
Offline support would be cool, but not useful enough to be a selling point for
me.

My current employer uses Jira, and I find it to be decent. I've used Asana in
the past, and I like it a lot, but it has its own holes and pain points. Same
for Pivotal Tracker, Github issues, Redmine, Bugzilla... Every tool I've used
has had some strong suits and some drawbacks—mainly related to how well it
fits with the project and workflow. A big plus is if the tool has a good API
(REST, plugin, etc.) so that I can easily write tooling to reduce friction.

Unless you can find a really strong selling point—and I don't think offline
support would qualify, for most people—I don't see it getting much traction.

------
biztos
I would argue that the world needs better issue tracking software, in much the
same sense that the world needs better software per se: there are lots of
things that are good, and a few that are great in their own way; the
Enterprise spends the most and gets the least for it; and for any two software
developers you will find three values of $GREAT when trying to come up with
your requirements.

Like many (most?) programmers working collaboratively, I have often wished I
had the "perfect" issue tracker, but my version of "perfect" maps very tightly
to the way I think software "should" be developed, at least among teams of
people working full-time for money.

In spite of my natural tendency to be sure, like every good programmer is
sure, that my hypothetical solution is vastly superior to all the horrible,
slow, confusing, buggy things that actually exists, I am forced to concede
that the corporate software world is not following my implied instructions.

So, in all seriousness, I think there are three huge challenges facing the
would-be creators of an issue tracker that would be $GREAT:

1\. You have to either accommodate a bunch of different workflows and be good
at most of them, or commit to One True Workflow and hope you can convince
people you're right.

2\. Even if you actually do make one that's more $GREAT than anything else,
the Enterprise world will not care -- and that's where the _only_ serious
issue-tracking money is, so you'd better do this for love and/or have a very
long runway. And if you get so far that they ever do care, you'd better have a
bunch of data-migration "whitepapers" ready.

3\. In order for anyone on a small team or open-source project to switch to
your software, you will have to convince them not only that it's better than
whatever they're using now, but also that it won't be offensive to people with
longstanding allegiances to other software. And making it unoffensive is
likely to contradict your definition of $GREAT.

All that said, go for it! You might be your only customer, but if that means
you've got the greatest issue tracker in the world then it might be worth it.

------
mateusfreira
I think this problem is not solved yet. we have gh issues that are confortable
and friendly for the developers, but is not good enough for the pms.In other
way we have jira ( or others like that) that are good for pms and worst for
developers. So I think who solve this problem with a good price will have a
space in this market yet. ps: once a year the last 4 years I've searched for
tools that solve this problem, and until now I haven't been successfull

------
mcbetz
Instead of asking broadly - and obviously get the answer "Yes! We need better
tools!", you might ask yourself why you wanted to make the tool firsthand. You
present two reasons:

\- Cross-Platform - well, web based applications all are \- Offline - that
would be extra value, Trello for example does not offer that

But neither of these two reasons alone would encourage anyone to get a new
project management tool.

You need some standalone features or feature a workflow that noone features so
far. Focus!

Here are some questions you might ask yourself or the community:

\- Do we need an issue tracker or a complete PM? This will determine your
target market \- For how many people do you need a PM? Single developer? Group
of 5? Group of 100s? \- Which type of projects do you work on? Software?
Marketing? \- How does your typical project workflow look like? \- Which part
of the workflow is still cumbersome, even when using software? \- What's the
one thing that a new project management tool should me with? \- If the new PM
tool was to do only one thing, how would you know that it does it perfectly?

You should probably come up with even more questions. Your goal must be to
find a use case and a market and find out what pains are not solved yet. The
more time and hence money a pain causes, the better you might create a product
that sells.

------
0x37
Are you me OP? I've been working exactly on the same project myself, and also
got demotivated.

First I planned to make it as a desktop app, but then I realised desktop apps
are thing of the past and nowadays you need to make web apps to be accessible
and portable.

Then I got demotivated by the number of great and established products.

Now I'm trying to figure out a new (developer oriented?) product to develop in
my free time.

It's tough not being among the first at something.

~~~
ImTalking
You never want to be first in a market. You spend way too many resources
educating the market, and you have no idea the size of the market. Especially
if you have finite resources. Better to enter an established market with a
better product.

------
ebiester
Honestly, you have to be better than trello for lightweight stuff, and rally
or jira on the heavyweight end. There really isn't room in the middle.

~~~
cweagans
"Better than Rally" is a _really_ low bar.

------
twunde
Issue tracking is a crowded space, but there are definitely niches to be
found. Almost everywhere I've worked has wanted to move to something
different. Focus on differentiating your product with existing competition,
even if it's just the number of integrations it has. Personally, I would also
suggest working on a developer-friendly alternative to service desk

------
Eridrus
At work, No, I don't want another one, I just want to be able to interact with
JIRA from chat without having to open the damn thing.

On my side project I'm using Trello, and for the issue tracking bits, it's not
perfect, but it's fine, if there was something better and free I'd use it, but
I like that it's SaaS and I don't want to install a native app.

------
nbrempel
Have you seen [https://www.realartists.com/](https://www.realartists.com/)?

------
TrevorJ
As a single developer, I've not been able to find something:

-Lightweight -Easy to use -Has a desktop client

Everything is oriented around being cloud driven, complex team-based features
I don't need, and just generally being more overhead than it's worth for what
I need.

------
gcb0
there is bugzilla. it's scalable, configurable, etc. the search is a little
clumsy, but a little work on it would make it just like jira's or any other
modern query based instead of form based search.

but you're not a startup cto if you use those dinosaur tools. just like you
won't use awk or make. because 1. it's not sexy 2. you're too lazy to learn
your job properly. 3. nobody gets ridiculed for selecting the sexy tool
instead of the right one, but the opposite is almost sure.

------
tckr
No.

------
dragonwriter
> Is anyone looking to replace existing project management and issue tracking
> software with something else?

I think lots of people are, or could be, but the deciding question is what
makes what you are thinking about different? What's the unique benefit you
plan to offer?

------
mikeryan
When it comes to these types of tools I think you need to figure out a target
market.

There's a lot of folks taking on the large scale software space, however I
think the non-technical space is still a bit wide open. I think a new Basecamp
would do well.

