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Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

We use JIRA at Etsy (although we use Github for code reviews, not crucible). It is certainly frustrating, but I tend to think it's a "the worst except the rest" situation. Do you have something you like significantly better? I've experimented with stuff like trello, basecamp etc. and still haven't found them significantly better.

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I'm currently using Trello quite a bit and also Asana for some newer projects. I really like the "physical card" feel of Trello. I'm a post-it note kind of guy. Asana seems pretty nice so far but is more grid-based. It's very clean and slick though.

We use JIRA with GreenHopper to support Agile at work. The users mostly just go to the Card / backlog views and I can say it's working pretty well. Not as smooth as Trello, but still good :)

Pivotal Tracker has been the most pleasant team task management experience I've had. Have previously used JIRA, Github Issues, Lighthouse, Mantis, and even a shared Google Doc on one project (works surprisingly well for small teams/projects over a short time period).

Agreed Pivotal one is great. I've tried several others and it's the simplest and easiest.

I've been using one called GravityDev at my job and it's nice ( although my team is using it like a PMO tracker despite my best efforts... ) but Pivotal is way simpler and nicer to use.

Though I have only used it in small teams.

We've recently moved from Pivotal to GreenHopper (Jira) and every single engineer wants to go back to Pivotal. We've given GreenHopper a couple of months to give it a fair chance, and in every way it's clunkier and more confusing than Pivotal.

Just curious, what were the reasons you decided to move away from Pivotal? We're looking for a new project management system and JIRA is one we've been looking at, but on first look, it does seem like information overload.

Pivotal Tracker is significantly better. We switched to Jira about six months ago and it has been very painful. The worst parts of my week are when I have to interact with Jira. Our sprint planning meetings used to be pleasant using Tracker because it helps guide things toward an effective agile workflow while mostly staying out of the way. Now that we use Jira, half of our planning meetings are spent fighting with the software rather than actually planning.

We use JIRA, but not in our planning meetings: a person writes down things on a whiteboard and then transcribes the result into JIRA issues. I don't know how applicable this is to your environment, but you may give it a try.

We have been using YouTrack from Jetbrains. I'm finding that it gets a lot of the little things right.

http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ was really easy to get started with for us - things 'just work' much like all the Jetbrains products.

Check out Gemini from Countersoft: http://www.countersoft.com - something a little different from the norm

Phabricator is a nice fully integrated alterative.

My team has been using phabricator for a while now and it is a really wonderful tool for doing code reviews and repository browsing and linking. It's also has a nice paste app.

The only downside is that occasionally nagios will squawk about no more free memory on the box and we'll see some of the PHP processing using upwards of 5GB RAM.

That's PHP for you. If you get behavior like this, you should be bugging Priestley.

Yeah, come hassle me about it. (I haven't seen this or heard other reports about it, so it might be something environmental.)

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