I'm lost now when it comes to project / dev / story etc management tools.
No idea what the best option is, any recommendations for tools developers will actually use or do you just need to do a custom integration with github issues?
No idea what the best option is, any recommendations for tools developers will actually use or do you just need to do a custom integration with github issues?
A few additional things would be required to make this work for less-technical team members, and you end up building some of your own workflow, but it means that E.G. you have options like "update the description of a ticket as part of the pull request that implements it".
(I'm in a many-repo company that used to use the per-repo bugtracker built into Bitbucket and switched many years to Jira. Jira has its warts, but it's miles better for the project management level task of burning down to a release.)
It's a losing battle between tool functionality and reporting abilities.
* Some of them make a mess of some part of git; one of them put its info in separate git branches you couldn't delete without breaking it, to ensure changes were always pushed/pulled even without a special push/pull command for the issue tracker.
* At least one of them kept their info in the repo in a dot-prefixed directory and auto added/committed the file as changes were made; this meant a single issue could be in different statuses depending on which branch you were on and there was no overarching view.
* The rest effectively ran in parallel to the git repo, pushing and pulling their data within it but requiring their own commands to do so, so it was totally possible to clone the repo and not get the issues.
* Most of them didn't have a non-repo way to track issues, for project managers and such. One did have a webview that ran from a repo, but it was up to you to figure out how to keep it in sync with the comments/etc devs were putting in their copies of the issue tracker.
Sibling mentions git-bug, a few others I recalled/quickly found:
https://github.com/aaiyer/bugseverywhere (I think this is one of the original ones)
https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue
https://github.com/neithernut/git-dit
https://github.com/google/git-appraise (I think this one is newest and I probably never tried it)
To me this is the main point of storing issues in git!
In any case, I believe that it's better to build a data model/storage without that concept (read: don't store the data in the same branch as the code) to have the freedom to built it with less constraint and make it right. Once that work you can add this "branch sensitivity" concept on top and again make it exactly how you want it.
An example of problem you get when storing the bug data in normal code branch: cool, you got the bugs state deeply stick with the code so you know exactly when a bug is resolved and in which branch. But now you are stuck with git only to deal with merge conflict, which means you might need to have the user fix it when it goes wrong. Will you push that to a non-technical person as well? Also, what happen when you rebase or cherry-pick?
- Very seriously discussed prototyping a remote robotically operated version of a real physical board with a friend when the pandemic started, but we both got too busy.
- Trello, with most optional things not turned on, is still the closest thing to a real kanban board. Do go ahead and enable GH integration, but don’t turn on the zillion things that turn it into yet another Jira.
- AirTable’s kanban view is surprisingly good, but it’s fundamentally a shared spreadsheet and a lot of UI/UX confusion comes from that because any filtering or sorting you do is global to others using the same view.
I'll check out Linear. Been looking at Clubhouse too.
Very DIY. You can build great workflows if you put the effort in. Brilliant reporting, main reason we adopted.
Clubhouse for example gives the agile structure (epics, stories etc) by default and you conform to it. Minimal setup effort. From a 'management' perspective I actually like monday, by the actual end users don't seem to like it.
Getting a true hierarchy and relationships requires similar thought to setting up a SQL DB. Powerful, but I don't think we have the resource to really build upon and support stuff.
We tried dozens and I've put it down as an unsolved problem.
* Advanced Roadmapping - JIRA will, given a pile of issues, sort them and fake-assign them to individuals on your team to determine how long it will take you to complete a project. This is way more powerful than burndown charts and cycles when you're planning a hardware project with a tightly-defined deadline. Without it I have to drop back to spreadsheets to provide any insight into when a project will be completed. It's especially important when the business peels engineers off the project.
* Time-based estimating - JIRA lets me plug hours in for estimates instead of railroading me into T-shirt sizes, which means I can actually use the tool to give an accurate estimate of when we'll be done. Linear requires you to calibrate your expectations by running a few cycles first, which makes it a really bad fit for projects that have a defined end date.
I think Linear has a lot of potential for teams that don't work to fixed deadlines, but for my purposes it's just a very fast spreadsheet.