Ask HN: Which Project Management/Issue Tracking for distributed teams? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which Project Management/Issue Tracking for distributed teams?

3 pointscodenerdz8 comments

Our team is distributed over several timezones, but this should apply to any people that work remotely.

As an experiment we tried to rely on GitHub issues as a project/task management/time tracking tool as well as issue tracking per se and so far its been a fairly dissatisfying experience. Mostly due to the fact that our needs eclipsed what GH issues supported fairly quickly.

Access Control: Generally speaking we have a 'Client' and 'Management' and 'Staff'. I want to only allow Client to assign issues to Management, which then decides if this Issue is a bug or a feature and reassigns it to the right Staff. I dont want Clients to be able to bother Staff directly. Neither Pivotal nor GitHub do this well. Redmine may be able to help.

Time Tracking: I want to be able to track how much time particular task is taking so that we are able to estimate further tasks better. Pivotal Tracker does this well, alas I dont think they provide a good reporting tool.

Bugs/Issues: Github doesnt allow assignment of an issue/bug to multiple people or the concept of watchers. Sometimes multiple people need to be notified of existence of a bug. Both Lighthouse and Redmine support this better

It looks like one choice is Pivotal in combination with Lighthouse but access control I think is lacking. Another one is Redmine which is not as nice as Pivotal, but allows for finer access control.

What do you guys use and recommend?

Redmine is what we're using now. It's had a very positive effect on our team's productivity and I wish we'd switched sooner. We've had problems with a few third-party plug-ins but Redmine itself has been very stable.

It's been a long road getting to where we are now. In the past we've used hosted tools on a per-project basis (Assembla, Unfuddle, Basecamp, etc.) and even built our own. Coming to Redmine, hosting it on our own server (which is necessary due to the kind of data we're working with) and customizing it for our projects has been delightful.

Not everything has been dandy, though. For one, getting it installed on Debian was rather difficult. It was actually easier to update Lenny to Squeeze and then install Redmine than it was to get Redmine running on Lenny.

More importantly, the quality of some third-party plug-ins we're using are highly varied when it comes to code quality, usability and / or documentation. The developer community is very active around Redmine, but unfortunately the plug-ins directory and forums are not equally as active.

I'm in the process of building a PM tool for my self and many on the pain points you mentioned are covered. The tool will be simple - any simpler and it would be excel + email.

If you are interested we can talk some more and maybe we can help each other.

I am also headed down this same road, we should chat.

Drop me a line, I have my contact info on my profile.

CodeBase - http://www.codebasehq.com/

Git repository, issue with watchers, time tracking and more.

I've been using it for about 2 years. It's very feature rich and has a great workflow.

I am quite happy with Projecturf, and I like it because it is simple, but it might be too simple for your needs. You might as well give it a try!

Can you describe if and how ProjectTurf solves the issues I outlined in my post?

Do you think it is better to have a simple/flexible project management tool? Or are certain processes (like web development) too unique and demanding to fit under this umbrella?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com