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Comment by semperos | Hacker News Reader

Shortcut (https://www.shortcut.com/) is a solid alternative to Pivotal Tracker. I work as an Engineering Manager there and helped build an importer for Pivotal Tracker data into Shortcut (https://github.com/useshortcut/api-cookbook/tree/main/pivota...).

Shortcut as a product is team-oriented with solid GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket and Slack integrations.

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Still feels like too many columns, too many states.

Pivotal Tracker - ice box, backlog, or current iteration.

I see companies in Trello Hell - well meaning, but often conflated, grey area states. There's like 10-15 columns on their boards.

It's a hot mess.

I worked on a tool more crowded than this and of late I’m coming around to the idea that these tools are all built for management which is why they get deployed. These drag and drop views aren’t that helpful for engineers. And they just make it easy for someone else to accidentally fuck up the status on your tasks.

The task list in Jira is good enough for finishing or marking one task as blocked and starting another. If anyone is using the interface like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, dragging things around at pace, it’s because people aren’t keeping their tasks updated and a tool can’t and probably shouldn’t try to fix that. You fix that by orienting the UI so devs benefit from using it, not by guilt tripping or lecturing.

I agree. People who like Pivotal Tracker (like me) for its focus and simplicity would not enjoy Clubhouse.

Woah wasn't this called Clubhouse at one point? I'm getting blast from the past! We used Clubhouse at Papa long time ago.

It was, and at that time it suddenly became much harder to do a web search on how to do anything in their UI! Turns out, Shortcut is not the most Google friendly name.

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