Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else?

10 points by jespr 8 years ago | 13 comments

I've worked professionally as a software developer for close to ten years - and I still haven't heard a developer say that they're excited or outright like the project management/scrum/kanban tool they're using.

People seem to outright hate JIRA. They seem to like Trello a bit more but often say that it's lacking something - I used Sprintly years ago, but that also didn't seem to be perfect.

What is the perfect tool out there that you really like (if there is one?) - what are the shortcomings and things you would like to see the perfect tool have.. or doesn't such a thing exist because it simply comes down to each company's individual use case..

Curious to hear your thoughts! :)

dasmoth 8 years ago |

Most of these tools seem to exist more for the benefit of managers than hackers.

For small groups, I think I honest-to-goodness prefer TODO.txt in the top level of the relevant repository to any tool. Otherwise, GitHub issues is a pretty nice lightweight-ish tool.

Lack of an explicit model of a "sprint" (which often seems to be where formal process starts to get reified in these tools) is a big plus in my book.

nrr 8 years ago | |

I'll second this suggestion, but I want to add one more thing. I suggest also writing a number 0-9 at the beginning of each line in said TODO.txt that represents some degree of priority, whatever that might mean for your project.

If you do that, you're consequently allowed use of, e.g., `sort TODO.txt | head` to figure out what to work on for the week. In addition, you can add in a regular review cycle to re-evaluate priorities, and that's all then kept in version control with the rest of the project.

It also happens to tick the capital-A Agile checkboxes, and when you grow past the point where you have strictly hackers on your team, the lift to move to another, more manager-friendly project management tool isn't nearly as arduous.

jespr 8 years ago | |

Interesting.. yeah a todo in its simplest form is not a bad idea :)

When you say "explicit model of a sprint" do you think about the whole start-date, end-date kind of thing per Kanban board? Or is it the kanban board itself that sort of leads to this formal process?

dasmoth 8 years ago | | |

Good question. Kanban isn't something I've particularly experienced, but I'd be willing to believe that a simple Kanban board might be a useful level of coordination for some people. Although my inclination is to say that if you need a mechanism to track which stuff is being worked on, you might have either too many people, or excessively fine-grained tasks.

cloudego 8 years ago |

I work as a lead developer at an enterprise that uses JIRA. This is a question very close to my heart.

JIRA is feature dense, but everyone hates it. The interface is complex and the learning curve is silly. We waste valuable hours fighting the tool. It was not made for software developers. It was a trouble ticket tool that treats software projects as if they were high priority catastrophes.

Trello is too malleable. Long story short, the question became, "Why don't we use sticky notes?" Sticky notes didn't work because we have 1 remote employee and a fistful of executives that demand involvement in tracking sprint progress (lolololo) but they are unwilling to sacrifice 10 minutes for standups or a trip downstairs to see the board.

At the end of the day, we spend time arguing about how to reduce friction for the development team and ignoring their needs because we already purchased JIRA licenses. If I started my own company, we would request features and track progress in the issue tracker of the source control product our devs chose. If project managers, scrum masters, execs, and other parties have a need for another project management tool they're welcome to use whatever integrates with the issue tracker.

The entire point of practicing agile development is to produce better software faster. Move decision making closer to the problem. Therefore, I don't understand why we can't manage our developers closer to the codebase. Every time they come up for air to the project management tool for someone else's benefit is a context switch that costs us. You wouldn't hire a mechanic to fix your car and tell him that he had to bring all of his tools to your garage to work.

If your clients or internal customers are using your issue tracker, they are actively showing you which features or bugs are impacting them the most. My experience is that JIRA, Trello or anything similar encourages you to create an interpretation layer for your customer's emotional responses. If you teach them to interact with your internal projects as if they were contributing to an open source project, you get a first person account of their priorities, and you may yourself with less empty stares around the room during product reviews.

bradknowles 8 years ago |

On a six-month contract I did in Cupertino, we started off with Pivotal. And we were very happy with what it provided.

However, Pivotal had decided to get out of the business of providing software that other people could install behind their firewall, and instead went to a pure SaaS model. So, the lost the business of a Fortune20 company that insists on running everything behind their firewall.

During the time I was there, I heard lots of discussions about alternatives, but nothing was considered satisfactory. One guy kept saying that we should just go ahead and choose Jira, because we all knew that is what management would force us to do regardless.

I never did hear what they finally chose. When my contract was up, I hightailed it back to Austin ASAP because CA was just way too bloody expensive.

SingAlong 8 years ago |

At work, we went from Asana to JIRA to Trello.

We stick to Trello because everyone in the company outside of Engineering team can also use it (nice & simple interface).

But I prefer to cut down the amount of human action any process. So I miss the JIRA-GitHub integration when using Trello. I could just mention the JIRA ticket ID in a PR and the ticket gets closed when the PR is merged. Such sweet integration.

I was looking forward to GitHub Projects when I heard about it since everyone in the company has a GitHub account. When I tried GitHub Projects, it felt so inverse to what I expected. I expected a GitHub Project to have many repositories instead of the current way (each project has many repositories). I'm hoping they change it.

jespr 8 years ago | |

Do PMs keep documentation around the features (high level, what's the purpose/function etc) in a separate tool than Trello? Or is that not a thing they do at all?

For Github Projects you mean each repository has many projects, but you wanted it to be each project could have many repositories, right? :) That does make it a lot harder, especially as what you work on grow bigger and span multiple repositories..

beckler 8 years ago |

Check out clubhouse.io

It's slick and lightweight, yet very powerful. One of the very few tools I feel like just gets project management right.

andymoe 8 years ago |

I've got a totally biases preference for Pivotal Tracker these days. It just kinda tells you what you're likely to get done each iteration. Really happy to not have the upfront commitment and ceremony of sprints in my life anymore.

jespr 8 years ago | |

Ugh. I meant to mention Pivotal as well in my original post - but I guess it slipped my mind :( That's what I used back in the day as well - and it seemed good, I can only imagine it has gotten better since

R4nger 8 years ago |

Never underestimate the power of stickies and a wall. I'd do a very simple do/doing/done online board along with it when remote co-workers were involved.

IMO, Comparing between scrum and kanban is pointless. As long as you have good periodic retrospectives, you'll find the team correcting itself to what works the best.

jespr 8 years ago | |

Do you follow a certain process in retrospective, or do you more just sit and have an open-hearted conversation with the members of the team?