Not OP, but we moved to Gitlab Issues.
Project Managers are missing some features, but the devs (including me) like it a lot more due to integrating so well with PRs/commits.
Project Managers are missing some features, but the devs (including me) like it a lot more due to integrating so well with PRs/commits.
With devs and a premium tier, this isn't bad... but the "ok, we need to double the user count and move from premium to ultimate, even though most people are only looking for multi-level epics and the reporter role." That represents a significant cost increase.
Taking all the devs from $29 to $99 and doubling the accounts is a lot more than $15 per account (devs, ba/pm/mgr, business).
I feel that it is breaking encapsulation in a sense to be dealing with issues at the repo level. The repo and the code are implementation details of the business requirements. The tickets describing requirements belong at the next level up of abstraction?
One way to approach this would be using Epics [0], which can live at the group-level. Child epics and/or issues can then be used for more finely tuned requirements.
I do use gitlab-ce at home for my personal projects and think it's awesome.
I would recommend it to work in terms of its features for code management and build pipelines.
But I just cannot see any of our product management team wanting to use this for Roadmap/Epic/Task tracking at all. Its far too technical and too close to the code, both of which are things they have neither the time, interest or skill to interact with. Management are comfortable with Jira (and some of the extended Atlassian suite), as it hides the technical stuff away and allows them to focus on the management data.
I don't know what the perfect solution looks like though, and I also haven't spend the time to exhaustively try all the competing products either.
>[Roadmap/Epic/Task tracking] Its far too technical and too close to the code
I'm a Product Manager in the Plan stage at GitLab and I'd love to learn more about this impression. Would you be willing to share more either in thread or on a call?
Specially, I'm trying to understand what about the GitLab Plan tools (epics, roadmaps, etc) feel dev-centric?
I was really impressed.
I double as a product manager and CTO, meaning I do both code and planning. We're using Github issues and Asana. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. I'd take both over Jira any day. And since I'm in charge, my company is blissfully free of anything Atlassian.
I kind of like Asana for planning. It's got a few sane features one of which is separating issues from projects. This allows me to quickly plan out projects and then add tickets to the relevant team boards. And another one is making it very easy to create issues in a spreadsheet like view that minimizes the click bureaucracy other tools have. Great when you basically are thinking at the bullet point level and just want to hit enter instead of having to fiddle with obnoxious modal forms.
Of course for developers Asana isn't great because it has no markdown support and no usable github integration (a few commercial things exist but they are basically glorified sync tools). Github issues have a few nice features as well. I like working with check lists and then converting the individual items to tasks. That comes close to how I like to use Asana.
Where Github falls off a cliff is what passes for project management. I don't know what their PMs were smoking but it's just completely wrong and useless. It kind of lives orthogonal to issues (!!!!!) and nothing syncs automatically except with really awkward github actions crap. So, it only serves to add a lot of bureaucracy and busy work without actually addressing the core problem. A combination of over engineered and inadequate.
The core issue with Github is that issues are tied to a single code repository. From a planning point of view that is just horrible because I manage a product consisting of multiple code repositories and I need one plan that may involve zero or more code repositories and not several and I don't want to lock in my issues to a single repository before I have even figured out what the plan is. I guess that's what they tried to fix with their project management thingy. Except they messed that up badly.
I'd love a tool that is a bit like Asana but more integrated with pull requests, CI/CD, the notion of work being distributed across multiple code repositories, teams, etc. I don't mean yet another sync thingy that copies tickets from system X to system Y. I would like a one stop shop that can be used throughout the life cycle of a software product from before any code is written until users / customers start reporting issues and everything in between. Doesn't exist.