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Comment by qabqabaca | Hacker News Reader

What would you recommend instead of Jira?

Stick to github issues or similar. Whatever is closer to the real work and gives you the biggest bang for the buck. Not the most wet dream. You do not need a gazillion of workflows and checks and stories and epics and boards etc. "Keep it simple, stupid"

What I like is to specify dependencies. Unfortunately, the simple ones (Github, Gitlab, Trac) don't have that feature.

The Jira we use at work has gone overboard. There is too many ways to specify and people are confused. For example, we have "blocks" (B cannot be finished without A closed) and "follows" (B cannot be started without A closed).

As a first step GitLab has implemented relationships in issues, for more context see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4058

Clubhouse [1] It has flexibility of Trello and features of Jira. We have been using for a year and we really enjoy it.

[1] https://clubhouse.io

Phabricator (https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/)

I would also recommend this. I've been using it for a while and it's amazing. Tightly integrated into version control, great team/project/task management, code review tools, great command line integration though arcanist.

Our team is happy with https://www.pivotaltracker.com

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

An opinionated workflow of collecting from a development team and its customers potential future efforts, estimates of the cost and value of those efforts, prioritizing based on those estimates (maximize expected value, minimize expected cost), scheduling & forecasting efforts based on a sound statistical model (e.g. estimation error).

You can accomplish most of that with Phabricator[1], except for the forecasting efforts. As for the forecasting; I worked at Amazon which had a dedicated JIRA engineer and that was the best I've ever seen JIRA being run and used. In my time there, I never saw any manager predict anything consistently accurate over the course of a long project with it without actually talking to engineering.

JIRA promises armchair management, but I've yet to see those tools actually work. That being said, you may be a better JIRA user than anyone I know. JIRA has always be promoted as a tool from the top down, never from the bottom up.

[1] - https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

JIRA's problem is it's too configurable and popular with folks who are into prescriptive authority, so it absolutely can be worst tool you've ever used, and frequently will be.

100% agree.

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