Show HN: Open-Source, Free, Agile Project Management Tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Open-Source, Free, Agile Project Management Tool

taiga.io

436 pointseposner134 comments

Taiga.io hit #1 on @HackerNewsYCBot for a while today (thanks HN!). Traffic up 100x. I was dumb enough to ask our developers if we could handle it. This is what they sent back

http://goo.gl/B57ERn

Each little "ball" is a request to the server On the left: the IP numbers from the users connecting around the world To the right: The url's being served up In the center: The "static calls being serviced by our front end

The brightness represents the speed with which the code written by our awesome developers delivers data (aided of course the great hardware)

Had any of the balls gone past to the right, that would have been a serve we couldn't return. Try that, Federer!

Nice video, haven't seen Logstalgia in a while! At first I didn't think the traffic looked that heavy but comparing the time and requests, quite decent numbers (~6600 hits in ~2 minutes).

And sweet job on Taiga, nice and clean looks!

Great job, both taiga and managing the peak so well. Any tips about the infraestructure you are running? Relaying on any PaSS or managing yourself?

Virtual machine, 1 core, 1 GB RAM, <20% CPU all the time.

Awesome.

FYI: Link shorteners are frowned upon on HN.

Curious about why. I'd understand a social stigma against ad-based redirection services, but does that translate into a frown against all shorteners somehow? Or is there some other cause?

They obscure the destination, track users, and break at some point in the future leaving a bad link in the archives.

Thanks.

Some of these aren't properties exclusive to redirection sites... but I'll readily admit they're very much standard features there, while mostly not too common elsewhere.

> Had any of the balls gone past to the right, that would have been a serve we couldn't return. Try that, Federer!

I do see a few balls going to the right -- what happened with those?

Those are 404 error... But very few in the context of the whole dataset

That is the most useless visualisation I think I've ever seen.

I love it.

Cool visualization! But the top 50% of that (which seems to be the most dense) could have been completely avoided if you just slapped a CloudFront instance in front of it.

I don't know -- by some guestimates fed into

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

I ended up with an estimated 600USD/month bill ... so what would they gain by complicating their architecture when they're already able to handle the traffic?

Using CloudFlare instead of CloudFront would have meant, what, $20/month?

And what guestimates would those be? I doubt they are serving 10TB in static files per month.

If adding a CDN to your architecture is too much complication then I would definitely not want to use your product for my business. It's literally a question of pointing CloudFront to your server, and substituting the CloudFront assigned domain in for static assets.

Also, from what I can tell, they aren't handling the traffic. I have tried numerous times to use the "Open Live Instance" link and it does not work.

Hi, the link should say (for now) "Almost ready" when you hover. We will have that ready soon (soon = days). We don't have problems with adding a CDN at all. We do that a lot for many other projects. It's just a matter of this "stealth launch of Taiga" going out of control, we didn't need a CDN for a 1 core + 1 GB RAM virtual machine, which is what is actually handling all the traffic. Having said that, expect a CDN in place next week.

Hi, thanks. I didn't mean to indicate you weren't capable of adding a CDN. I was just providing a counter to the "why complicate the architecture" argument.

Thanks for the explanation of the "Almost Ready" message. I do see that, however I took it to mean that an instance was being spun up (as I waited). Might want to change that to "Coming Soon" or similar.

> And what guestimates would those be?

1gb/week with 60% traffic to the US, average 20kb size with 1000 reset requests/month. I'd love to hear some more realistic estimates. And while (server/service) price is far from the most important consideration, it sounds like they manage to stay way under 50 usd/month in hosting currently. So as anything over 30/month would be a considerable (relative) increase. Add to that doubling? the management overhead from, say, an hour a week to two -- and they'd need to see some clear benefits? And what are those?

As for "open live instance, it says "ready soon" for me - but perhaps that is because they didn't, as you say, handle the traffic after all?

You are actually seeing the dedicated IP "custom ssl certificate" charge ($600/month). Check the cost with and without that option. I just used your exact numbers and the monthly cost is $0.73 without that.

Note that doesn't mean you cannot serve your resources over HTTPS. It just means you cannot alias something like "cdn.yoursite.com" to the cloudfront cdn, you will need to use the cloudfront https url.

You only need to pay the $600/month if you need to support clients older than IE7. You can use the SNI option instead which is "free" (relative to the rest of the costs associated with a CFD).

I did think it came out oddly high -- I also didn't chceck ssl/dedicated ip... I think. Maybe the calculator helpfully updated itself with more "reasonable" settings... ;-)

[edit: yep, was the ssl cert thing. Now I end up with 0.00 USD/Month, which certainly isn't an unbearable expense...]

So can we get this code as well?

This is generated using Logstalgia, which is a website access log visualization tool.

https://code.google.com/p/logstalgia/

It also did incredibly well on the Facebook Community Page...

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1562750133...

They have a CLI interface in addition to the web interface. That's a refreshing feature.

They also have a vagrant box which you can use to take it for a spin until the live instance is ready.

https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-ncurses

https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-vagrant

I think these features are really what sold me.. project managers might like having a visual interface to work with (webapp) but I would much rather just be in my terminals

I love the idea of Open Source applications being distributed this way. Here's our application.... and everything required to run it in a virtual machine.

It's more common than you think; RT and Trac both have cli interfaces.

You can do a lot of things in RT via email also, e.g. close a ticket, assign to someone else, move it to another queue, etc. with special tokens in the email body.

The kanban approach is quite similar to Odoo Project.

You can test the online demo: http://bit.ly/1CGha87

The Odoo Project website: https://www.odoo.com/page/project-management

And the github page: https://github.com/odoo/odoo

Some of the features I like in Odoo project: email gateway, pivot table reporting, cross-project tasks or reporting, timesheet integration.

I was surprised I hadn't heard of Odoo before, but now I see it's the new name of OpenERP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odoo

I've been using Target Process which is free for small teams - albeit not open source.

http://www.targetprocess.com/

Thanks for the link, this looks interesting I normally use Trello and CherryTree (which is a simply stunning notes application for programmers (and none programmers but it understands how to mark up code and can export to HTML and PDF but I digress)) but this looks like it could replace Trello at least :).

What's your relation with OpenErp / Odoo ? (i'm implementing OpenERP/Odoo for some of my clients :-) )

He seems affiliated or at least heavily invested: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pinky07

In my head OpenERP was the company that took contributed code, changed the license and slapped a price tag on it? (Anyone: Feel free to defend them, - it might just be my bias against AGPL and the fact that I thought their price tag for the commercial version was unrealistic last time I evaluated it.)

Not at all.

Of course, Odoo has dependencies on several libs but the whole code (framework and the 240 official modules) have been written from scratch. (I wrote a huge part of it)

That's actually the reason why it's so integrated; there are no interfaces between the different apps; every app is fully standalone (you can install project management only) but fully integrates with the others when you install more modules. (timesheets on tasks, billing of projects, contracts related to projects, ...)

As a system integrator, I agree (and cry! at the lost revenue from integrating two systems never designed to talk to each other).

DISCLAIMER: I am an Odoo partner.

I think you're thinking of ActiveCollab

I am the founder of Odoo / OpenERP.

Yes, but this is meant to be intuative and well designed.

Snarky comments aside, where odoo falls down is that it tries to be everything and do everything and unsurprisingly falls short if you compare it to a single purpose application.

Honestly, I'd be happy to see someone write a kanban javascript plugin / extension / webapp that wrapped any shitty PM tool with an API.

Looks interesting, but I couldn't keep the site open for long because it was eating both of my two CPU cores.

Firefox 32.0.3 on Ubuntu

About 62 % of time is spent in FFS.CanvasRenderer.prototype.render()

Found it sluggish even in Safari 7.1 (OS X 10.9.5)

Very strange! I have opened a issue for review that strange behavior. Seems something related to graphics.

Thanks!

The browser is constantly repainting the polygon background at the top of the page, even when you've scrolled past it.

I could hear my hard drive screeching when I was looking at the transition on the topmost container. Even though the moving background looks nice, I'd still prefer to sustain my battery for bit longer. Your site just ate 2% of it.

I doubt it was your hard drive screeching you heard. There's nothing happening on that page that would be writing to disk. Maybe the fans were going nuts trying to keep the CPU cool.

Could be swapping in and out of ram to disk? That makes a lot of noise (from experience).

Might be the CPU too. My previous laptop with a first-gen i5 made quiet, but audible screeching noises sometimes.

Most likely just your CPU or case fans picking up speed to compensate for higher CPU usage/heat.

Pretty sure you wouldn't be able to hear the actual CPU,.

I have the same issue. Latest Firefox is utilizing 50% of my CPU.

The problem is in the taiga.io web, isn't it?

The problem is the animation on the top of the page.

But the application hasn't this problem.

Correct.

yeah, noticed that scrolling down was very sluggish.

Hi! Thank you all for your feedback; you were right about the animation at the main page: we have just changed for a static (and still awesome) image, so you may notice an improved performance from any device.

Trying to create a project, but it fails silently in Safari 7.1. Console shows:

    Error: [$rootScope:inprog] $apply already in progress
    http://errors.angularjs.org/1.2.21/$rootScope/inprog?p0=%24apply
    https://tree.taiga.io/js/libs.js?v=1411736467704:7:6833
    beginPhase@https://tree.taiga.io/js/libs.js?v=1411736467704:10:28050
    $apply@https://tree.taiga.io/js/libs.js?v=1411736467704:10:34546
    https://tree.taiga.io/js/app.js?v=1411736467704:11:34777
    $broadcast@https://tree.taiga.io/js/libs.js?v=1411736467704:10:36161
    newProject@https://tree.taiga.io/js/app.js?v=1411736467704:11:64709
    https://tree.taiga.io/js/libs.js?v=1411736467704:12:8225
    https://tree.taiga.io/js/libs.js?v=1411736467704:12:19733
    $eval@https://tree.taiga.io/js/libs.js?v=1411736467704:10:34216
    $apply@https://tree.taiga.io/js/libs.js?v=1411736467704:10:34567
    https://tree.taiga.io/js/libs.js?v=1411736467704:12:19719
    dispatch@https://tree.taiga.io/js/libs.js?v=1411736467704:3:11392
    handle@https://tree.taiga.io/js/libs.js?v=1411736467704:3:6222
    libs.js:9:87982

Hi! We have added this issue and we'll review it. Thanks for taking some time to try Taiga and for the feedback :D

Looks nice so far. Looking forward to the "live instance", assuming it will be a pre-populated project showing off all of the functionality.

I manage multiple concurrent projects, and I don't see an overview of open issues across projects. Am I missing that, or are there plans to add that?

You are right, we currently don't have the way to see issues across all projects, but we have plans to implement something like this for future versions.

Thanks!

No, no...thank you for your contribution!

Nice. Clean layout. Much prettier than jira.

When viewing a story, it'd be nice to be able to change the status without going into edit mode. Or something like a transition (aka how mingle does it) to say "start work" or "done with testing"

Thanks to the feedback.

We have plans to do something like you proposal, because the current behavior requires some "useless" additional clicks.

We try improve this in next versions.

Looks nice, Looking forward to the live demo :)

We're currently employing OpenProject[1], a Chili/Redmine fork with extensive Agile/Scrum[2] functionality. Despite all valid points against Redmine being bloated, it provides many features often lacking elsewhere (Auth Providers such as LDAP / Single-Sign On, Plugins).

[1] http://openproject.org/ [2] https://www.openproject.org/projects/openproject/wiki/Agile_...

We're going to release a migration tool from Redmine to Taiga in the following weeks. Please keep an eye if you want to try Taiga with all your Redmine projects.

Also worth checking out is Bugs:

http://pixeline.github.io/bugs/

Issue management, Kanban board, extremely simple to setup (Apache, MySQL).

Bugs is (are? heh) written in PHP.

so?

He's making a spelling joke, as Bugs is plural but a project on itselve is singular ;)

So it should be, Bugs is written in PHP ;)

Concerning your: "the Project Management Tools that are out there weren't making us happy. In fact we hated the whole lot of them. Bloated, slow, ugly to look at and unintuitive, we just couldn't stand the sight of them a moment longer." How does your project relate to http://92fiveapp.com/ which was posted here some time ago in a somewhat similar vein?

Honestly, we didn't know this existed. Thanks for pointing this out, it looks really great! The CC BY-ND license, though, would have been a stopper for us.

Some of the text on the home page is extremely light. It makes it hard to read against the white background. From a designing standpoint I would suggest to darken that text up a bit. The "Did we say free..." text is also hard to read. Maybe put one of those transparent black boxes behind it?

Completely agree, We add the issue, and we will fix it in the next upload. Thanks :)

This looks super interesting, thank you very much for working on it, I think you're doing a great thing by making it open source. :) It's really frustrating that the tools we use for planning (e.g. Trello) generally aren't modifiable.

Looks great, can't wait to see the demo, and the acknowledgement of entering an already crowded space. Personally I think many of the tools that are out there right now could very very easily be out-performed by an open source tool.

I sometimes wonder if killing another company's revenue by creating an open-source tool (that is as-good or better, which you generally strive to) is moral/ethical... I know it's not bad, but feels kind of weird to take their lunch

Little nitpick -- the "In Beta" stripe in the top left doesn't really mesh with the rest of your style choices (neither in font choice, tone, etc)...

I like the designs so far -- most of the sections look pretty good

They are destroying other companies revenues (but let's wait and see) and making revenues for themselves (they want to launch a PaaS at the end of the beta). This is what we call business and it happens all the time. Example: Apple and Google have been doing it to Microsoft in the last ten years.

Doing it by open source doesn't make it less or more moral than doing it by close source or any other lawful way.

Anyway, even a pure open source model would have been very moral in my humble opinion: it might harm one company but it lets many more companies lower their operating costs. One company performs worse, many companies perform better. Overall that's a good thing for me.

Open source isnt 'the enemy' that destroys value in existing software; if your software relies on being closed source (temporarily even) to maintain its competitive edge (eg. android) thats totally up to you. It can be effective.

...but if open source destroys an existing product, honestly, that product was going the way of the dinosaurs anyway.

Morally speaking, free software unencumbered by licenses, patents and other cruft contributes far more than it harms.

First off, really slick interface and seemingly very full featured beta!

I am a little confused on the Scrum Sprint Taskboard vs Kanban board. We use a combination of the two with a Kanban board being the Sprint backlog/board. It seems there is no easy way to move cards when viewing the Sprint Taskboard and when enabling the Kanban module in the project, yes the Kanban board is usable for the tasks/stories but the columns in the two are not in sync. Maybe we're doing it wrong, but how should a team move the stories through to done during a sprint?

Hi! There is no real integration between a sprint taskboard and a kanban in taiga.io Doing so could end up being a nightmare because both flows work differently. Nothing prevents you from having two open sprints with two separate sprint taskboards so trying to sync both workflows with different "entities" and different metric is very difficult. Typically, you would use either Scrum or Kanban and "feel the kanban" with the sprint taskboard, but when you active both you are entering uncharted land in some way. So, no, you're not doing it wrong, it's just complicated. But, basically, to answer your question: a team can move a user story (Scrum) to done when all its tasks are in a state that is considered "done". Thanks a lot fro trying taiga, we love this kind of feedback. We will soon launch a mailing list to centralize these type of questions :)

The task board and sprint planing looks really good (even if it seems that they mix up two different methods with Kanban & SCRUM). I wish github would provide similar functionality out of the box.

You can deactivate one of them if you want it in the "admin" section.

Thanks for your feedback!

The project seems really nice, the import from redmine is very much appreciated, especially as most of people who may be interested to use this application are likely to already use something, and will therefore need something to make the migration painless

I've seen there's a ncurses client, would it be possible to also have a full CLI one too. The rational behind would be that this way linking my git repository and taiga would be as simple as changing my hook script to use this CLI tool, same for the CI scripts

Completely agree, I will add this User Story to our backlog, then all depends on priorities or our free-time interests :P

Thanks for the feedback

Why is it always the thing I needed yesterday is on HN today?

I went with DoneDone (http://www.getdonedone.com/)

Repositories (Git, Mercurial, Subversion) hosted by us integrate with DoneDone quite well: https://xp-dev.com/features/repository-integrations.html

(Disclaimer: I run+manage xp-dev.com)

This looks great at first.

We will see if the flow is useful to enough people and if it's worth paying vs other options available right now. Project management software is hard as there are so many different way of dealing with projects.

Also, I hope it works great on mobile or it's in the plan, otherwise it might be a deal breaker.

Also, I think I like the fact it's open source with a paid hosting if we want. Let's see how they deal with that on the long term.

It looks very nice and easy to use. Question though. Do you have something for Epics like in Jira, or a way to create sub-projects for a project?

At this momment we do not have plans for subprojects and review tool. But we will consider them, as possible future features. Epics or something like that seems a interesting feature. I will put it on our backlog.

Thank you very much!

No worries... Keep up the good work. Having used Jira for several years, along with Github issues and some other software for managing Projects within Projects, Epics or Milestones really help for keeping things together.

Review Tools are nice if you don't have one already in place

Also, is there any future plans for building in some sort of review tool?

What do you exactly mean by review tool?

With the Atlassian Tools, there is Crucible which allows you to pull in revisions to be able to compare and diff files and post comments.

Is there any such tool (free or not) that integrates with GitHub and it is ready to use?

It would be great to not maintain 2 issues list, 2 milestones etc.

Nope, sorry, we have plans of some (optional) better integration with github, anyway the API of taiga allow you to do anything you can do from the web client, and the GitHub API is great too, anyone can write a sync system between taiga and github issues/milestones. But take care, we use milestones for user stories, not issues. You can sync github issues to taiga user stories.

An other post mentioned http://www.getdonedone.com/ which promises GitHub, Basecamp, Harvest etc integration

I've seen https://waffle.io/ talked about in previous posts, but haven't used it or Taiga. Github issues is painful enough in the past that, for companies I've been in at least, we used other issue trackers anyway (Jira and Pivotal specifically) so I'm not sure how market there is outside of open-source. For me, Taiga looks like a nicer solution for private projects (replacing redmine, trac, etc.)

I'm waiting for Codetree (https://codetree.com/) to be released! I have high hopes on it (not affiliated with them in any way)

SweepBoard? http://sweepboard.com

Looks very promising. I like the idea focusing on Kanban and Scrum and not making to work on everything and that way turning to too complicated.

Angular needs some optimization obviously or maybe the server is just slow? It would be cool to see text complete when writing users stories. Like: As a... Also, poker planning and retrospective tools would be nice to see.

Having worked on some agile project management tools, it seems that the space has an unusually high number of customer requests for slight variations/customizations. I am very optimistic about an open source implementation if it allows users to easily adjust the product to meet their specific needs. Best of luck!

Looks beautiful. Our workflow however requires us to view multiple projects under one backlog/workboard. I can't seem to find a way to do that, which is a bummer because this is a really neat looking tool.

Yep, I understand what you say. But every sentence that begins with "Our workflow..." tends to be so specific that is very very difficult to build a platform that solves any possibility. taiga.io has a very powerful tag system. You could use tags to define projects. It's fast, easy and might work...

The "IN BETA" ribbon is using a serif font, I don't think it's done on purpose. TMHO it breaks the overall visual consistency of the page.

Yes, is a font problem in some browser because we use SVG for the "IN BETA", we going to change it to a PNG.

Thanks for the feedback :)

Am I the only one who thinks anyone that talks about software development methods(agile, scrum, etc) is trying to pull a fast one on you?

I wouldn't say "anyone" but I always like to detect is the conversation is only about the methodology itself, not the purpose of it.

Trying to create a project on iOS gave me no love. Possibly this is related to the existing safari issue someone already mentioned.

We have a couple issues with Safari. One of them is related to the layout because Safari 7 has some issues with flexbox but it's already fixed in a branch and should be merged really soon. We also have an issue with this JS problem with Safari when creating a new project that we are reviewing. Thanks for your feedback. Everything should be working well with Firefox and Chrome if you want to create a project right now. :)

I'll try it out with chrome when I'm home. 😃

The splash page is pretty enough in a generic sort of way, but nothing works with JavaScript disabled, which is quite unfortunate.

Our web client relies heavily on javascript. We can't ignore the fact that it helps a lot. Having said that, we are developing a ncurses terminal client for terminal lovers, so it seems we went all across the spectrum with taiga...

Been using Taiga since it showed up on here. It's fantastic!

My only complaint is that I can't edit comments XD

The "open live instance" doesn't do anything for me. Tried Firefox and Chromium.

If you refers to sandbox live instances, they are currently not available, sorry. Coming soon!

Does this have some kind of git integration? Like linking to commits/branches

Not yet, but it's something we definetely have for the mid-term. This was our first release (beta still) and we could have waited until we had git integration but we thought we should listen first, then adapt to what people need. No surprises here, git integration is something a lot of people would like to see.

I can dig it. Seems a little choppy, but what'evs. It's Free!

Is there any plan to add any features for the accounting of a project?

We think custom fields could solve most of what people with such needs are looking for. Accounting is a big word, it means different things to different teams, so most probably custom fields + API (so you can integrate taiga.io with your accounting system) will be the silver bullet. Thanks for trying taiga.io, btw

Are there any plans to add git branch/commit intergration?

The plan is integration by git hooks like close issues/task/us by commit message, but isn't planned a git browser of features like this.

Maybe you can combine it with Kallithea? https://kallithea-scm.org/

Or Phabricator, which has much more features: http://phabricator.org/

"Free Agile" read "Fragile"

Any examples of the video conferencing feature?

Well, the video conferencing feature is a simple link to third party services (talky.io and appear.in) you can configure it on the admin interface of the project.

Anyway you can use talky.io and appear.in without taiga, they are great services!

Why do you offer only cloud based?

They are not only cloud based. They have a link to download the code (https://github.com/taigaio) and let you host it yourself.

Is it possible to change the font? It is so, narrow and tall.

Something else I'd like to see. Make empty columns more narrow when empty to preserve space when it can be done.

A bit off topic, but does there exists any app for these things native to OSX? I don't like these web-interfaces.

Hi, is open source, is really easy to change the font (on your own instance).

The project have an API and the web (AngularJS) application, but anybody can build an application using the api like the web application, maybe an OSX native application. A native OSX client isn't in our road-map.

An example of this is the taiga-ncurses application for terminal lovers :)

But the parent has a point. That font is really hard on the eyes.

Taiga design team here! We are currently using two fonts: - "Open Sans Condensed Light" for the titles. - "Droid Sans" for the text.

Both are well known fonts and extremely used. We used Droid Sans in the text to make it easily readable. Titles are supposed to be readable, of course, but creative at the same time.

We added the issue to review with more testers if they see that problem as well. Thanks for the feedback :)

Hello,

Great application, I'm especially impressed with the django/rest-framework backend (getting some ideas for my own project from looking at how you guys implemented permissions...)

That said, the first thing that jumped out when I tried it was the fonts. It seems like the use of tall and skinny fonts makes it hard to read and imo hurts the design.

Definitely get more feedback on those and check out other modern/popular webapps to get ideas!

Other than that great job!

(PS It'd be awesome if you guys blogged about your use with django/restframework/angular if you haven't already!)

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