
Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else? - jespr
I&#x27;ve worked professionally as a software developer for close to ten years - and I still haven&#x27;t heard a developer say that they&#x27;re excited or outright like the project management&#x2F;scrum&#x2F;kanban tool they&#x27;re using.<p>People seem to outright hate JIRA. They seem to like Trello a bit more but often say that it&#x27;s lacking something - I used Sprintly years ago, but that also didn&#x27;t seem to be perfect.<p>What is the perfect tool out there that you really like (if there is one?) - what are the shortcomings and things you would like to see the perfect tool have.. or doesn&#x27;t such a thing exist because it simply comes down to each company&#x27;s individual use case..<p>Curious to hear your thoughts! :)
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dasmoth
Most of these tools seem to exist more for the benefit of managers than
hackers.

For small groups, I think I honest-to-goodness prefer TODO.txt in the top
level of the relevant repository to _any_ tool. Otherwise, GitHub issues is a
pretty nice lightweight-ish tool.

Lack of an explicit model of a "sprint" (which often seems to be where formal
process starts to get reified in these tools) is a big plus in my book.

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jespr
Interesting.. yeah a todo in its simplest form is not a bad idea :)

When you say "explicit model of a sprint" do you think about the whole start-
date, end-date kind of thing per Kanban board? Or is it the kanban board
itself that sort of leads to this formal process?

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dasmoth
Good question. Kanban isn't something I've particularly experienced, but I'd
be willing to believe that a simple Kanban board might be a useful level of
coordination for some people. Although my inclination is to say that if you
need a mechanism to track which stuff is being worked on, you might have
either too many people, or excessively fine-grained tasks.

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cloudego
I work as a lead developer at an enterprise that uses JIRA. This is a question
very close to my heart.

JIRA is feature dense, but everyone hates it. The interface is complex and the
learning curve is silly. We waste valuable hours fighting the tool. It was not
made for software developers. It was a trouble ticket tool that treats
software projects as if they were high priority catastrophes.

Trello is too malleable. Long story short, the question became, "Why don't we
use sticky notes?" Sticky notes didn't work because we have 1 remote employee
and a fistful of executives that demand involvement in tracking sprint
progress (lolololo) but they are unwilling to sacrifice 10 minutes for
standups or a trip downstairs to see the board.

At the end of the day, we spend time arguing about how to reduce friction for
the development team and ignoring their needs because we already purchased
JIRA licenses. If I started my own company, we would request features and
track progress in the issue tracker of the source control product our devs
chose. If project managers, scrum masters, execs, and other parties have a
need for another project management tool they're welcome to use whatever
integrates with the issue tracker.

The entire point of practicing agile development is to produce better software
faster. Move decision making closer to the problem. Therefore, I don't
understand why we can't manage our developers closer to the codebase. Every
time they come up for air to the project management tool for someone else's
benefit is a context switch that costs us. You wouldn't hire a mechanic to fix
your car and tell him that he had to bring all of his tools to your garage to
work.

If your clients or internal customers are using your issue tracker, they are
actively showing you which features or bugs are impacting them the most. My
experience is that JIRA, Trello or anything similar encourages you to create
an interpretation layer for your customer's emotional responses. If you teach
them to interact with your internal projects as if they were contributing to
an open source project, you get a first person account of their priorities,
and you may yourself with less empty stares around the room during product
reviews.

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bradknowles
On a six-month contract I did in Cupertino, we started off with Pivotal. And
we were very happy with what it provided.

However, Pivotal had decided to get out of the business of providing software
that other people could install behind their firewall, and instead went to a
pure SaaS model. So, the lost the business of a Fortune20 company that insists
on running everything behind their firewall.

During the time I was there, I heard lots of discussions about alternatives,
but nothing was considered satisfactory. One guy kept saying that we should
just go ahead and choose Jira, because we all knew that is what management
would force us to do regardless.

I never did hear what they finally chose. When my contract was up, I
hightailed it back to Austin ASAP because CA was just way too bloody
expensive.

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SingAlong
At work, we went from Asana to JIRA to Trello.

We stick to Trello because everyone in the company outside of Engineering team
can also use it (nice & simple interface).

But I prefer to cut down the amount of human action any process. So I miss the
JIRA-GitHub integration when using Trello. I could just mention the JIRA
ticket ID in a PR and the ticket gets closed when the PR is merged. Such sweet
integration.

I was looking forward to GitHub Projects when I heard about it since everyone
in the company has a GitHub account. When I tried GitHub Projects, it felt so
inverse to what I expected. I expected a GitHub Project to have many
repositories instead of the current way (each project has many repositories).
I'm hoping they change it.

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jespr
Do PMs keep documentation around the features (high level, what's the
purpose/function etc) in a separate tool than Trello? Or is that not a thing
they do at all?

For Github Projects you mean each repository has many projects, but you wanted
it to be each project could have many repositories, right? :) That does make
it a lot harder, especially as what you work on grow bigger and span multiple
repositories..

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beckler
Check out clubhouse.io

It's slick and lightweight, yet very powerful. One of the very few tools I
feel like just gets project management right.

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andymoe
I've got a totally biases preference for Pivotal Tracker these days. It just
kinda tells you what you're likely to get done each iteration. Really happy to
not have the upfront commitment and ceremony of sprints in my life anymore.

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jespr
Ugh. I meant to mention Pivotal as well in my original post - but I guess it
slipped my mind :( That's what I used back in the day as well - and it seemed
good, I can only imagine it has gotten better since

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R4nger
Never underestimate the power of stickies and a wall. I'd do a very simple
do/doing/done online board along with it when remote co-workers were involved.

IMO, Comparing between scrum and kanban is pointless. As long as you have good
periodic retrospectives, you'll find the team correcting itself to what works
the best.

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jespr
Do you follow a certain process in retrospective, or do you more just sit and
have an open-hearted conversation with the members of the team?

