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Ask HN: What are some good tools for keeping a software project on track?

• boffinism 9y ago
  In my experience, what matters most is good communication. Whatever tool you use, what matter most is making sure your team are diligent about updating it, and about responding to updates by others. If you can get them doing that, then using a spreadsheet or a wall of post-it notes will give you 80% of the benefits of using the most advanced dashboard/kanban/IM tool. If you can't get them doing that, then even the most advanced tools won't save you.
  • LrnByTeach 9y ago
    Bingo.. these 4 things are the crux of the Project Management .. > In my experience, what matters most is good communication. > Whatever tool you use, what matter most is making sure your team are diligent about updating it, and about responding to updates by others > If you can get them doing that, then using a spreadsheet or a wall of post-it notes will give you 80% of the benefits of using the most advanced dashboard/kanban/IM tool. > If you can't get them doing that, then even the most advanced tools won't save you.
• taprun 9y ago
  As a former pm, I sure hope you're going to track risks. Things that are (or should be) spotted early need to be tracked and managed.
• ksikka 9y ago
  For 1 and 3, it's the process that matters more than the tool. One process I found effective is maintaining a spreadsheet of tasks and a spreadsheet of larger milestones, updated in periodic meetings. For the task spreadsheet, you can have a twice-a-week stand up where everyone goes around and updates their own tasks on a google sheet in turn. For the milestone spreadsheet, a period between one month and one quarter works well. Although meetings are often eschewed by software engineers, they really do help to keep projects on track. Also appoint someone to be in charge of tracking the "health" of various milestones, red = needs course correction, orange = at risk, green = on track, etc.
• dreamdu5t 9y ago
  Lines of communication and chain of command are more important than tools. The only person who should need to know what you're doing is who you report to. And so on all the way to the top. Trello, jira, aha, whatever won't help if you don't have clear lines of communication and a chain of command
• gaius 9y ago
  The only project management tool I've ever seen work effectively - I'm not even kidding - is a whiteboard with Post-it notes stuck to it. Everything else is snake oil.
  • zwetan 9y ago
    how do you make that work for a "remote team" ?
    • dasmoth 9y ago
      Something Trelloesque is the obvious answer, but I'm curious if anyone's tried whiteboard+webcam.
      • eikenberry 9y ago
        We did this once and it didn't work. The whiteboard's appeal is its size and interactivity. The webcam version loses both of those qualities.
      • gaius 9y ago
        whiteboard+webcam You could call it a trelloscope
        • akoncius 9y ago
          holy shit, good name!
    • whorleater 9y ago
      trello/github projects/whatever hip new trello clone came out this month
  • dyim 9y ago
    We use Trello and it works great. Its closest skeuomorphic equivalent is... a whiteboard with Post-it notes stuck to it.
• sAbakumoff 9y ago
  1. Jira is awesome for it.
• jaequery 9y ago
  unfortunately, there is no one good tool. you'd have to use a combination of Asana, JIRA, and something like Productplan. it is quite interesting to see that no one has yet created one that combines all three in a simple / minimal interface.
• jaequery 9y ago
  unfortunately, there is no one good tool. you'd have to use a combination of Asana, JIRA, and something like Productplan. it is quite interesting to see that no one has yet created one that combines all three in a simple / minimal interface.
• zwetan 9y ago
  simply look at the tools you can find on Github or similar: issue tracker, wiki, versioning of release, etc.
• laktek 9y ago
  Let me answer those with what we are currently doing in our remote startup: 1) Team members have to reply to a thread on "What are you working on?" at the end of the day. This keeps everyone informed of progress and blockers. 2) We use the CI dashboard to answer this (any changes to the master branch are auto-deployed to staging, and then staging is manually promoted to production.) 3) We use a Gantt chart to track high-level milestones (usually we go through it once a week to see where we are at).
• speedracr 9y ago
  Post-its are hard to beat because they function as a backdrop and everyone walks by a couple of times per day, whether they want to or not. For remote teams that run on Slack, give http://www.slash-done.com/ http://www.slash-done.com/ a try - a good friend of mine had this built after missing a simple way of having everyone check in once their tasks were completed.
• Walkman 9y ago
  not tools, however these are the best: your brain, your mouth and some things you can write with. Maybe a computer.
  • biot 9y ago
    The computer would certainly help convey the speech and writing to the remote team.
• a_imho 9y ago
  Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
  • busterarm 9y ago
    Definitely this. Responsible people who care about the work and have a spine when required are what keep projects on track.
• dasmoth 9y ago
  1. Know what each other are working on? (progress/blockers) The closest thing I've seen to a nice solution to this is to e-mail a brief report of what you've been up to to the manager at the end of the week, who collates into a summary at the start of the following week. Lightweight, avoids superfluous detail (because the coordinator can edit it out), and not so fine-grained that individuals can't sit on a problem for a day or two while thinking it over if that's their preferred style. Obviously, this doesn't preclude talking about individual issues during the week! But daily check-ins force this too quickly in my view.
• ryandrake 9y ago
  Incomplete problem statement. Project size plays a big role. A lot of solutions posted so far (post-its, E-mail, whiteboard) work well for 2 person projects, with discipline scale to 20 person projects, are problematic for 200 person projects, and are totally inappropriate for 2000 person projects. Specialized tools are recommended when projects scale beyond 10-20 people. Formal process helps. You also need to track risks as another poster pointed out. If your project is a part of a larger whole, you need to track dependencies and their schedules (other teams at your company, vendors/suppliers, 3rd party open source dependencies, etc.)
  • jcoffland 9y ago
    200-2000 person projects may be what the big guys do but that does not mean it's a good idea. There's bound to be massive inefficiency with large numbers of developers working on the same project. The resulting software will reflect the complicated political structures required to organize that many people and will suffer greatly for it. Small teams are the most successful at producing quality software in a reasonable time frame regardless of problem complexity.
• olalonde 9y ago
  Small team here. 1. We do all of this from Github using issues, milestones and projects. We have a GitHub Slack integration which can also give a feel of what everyone's working on. We also have a meeting every Monday where everyone says what they'll be working on this week. 2. Master branch is always in production. Staging branch is always in staging. We use CircleCI for CI/CD. 3. Milestones in GitHub.
  • Thriptic 9y ago
    Yeah we used to use Jira for a < 10 person team mostly based on my insistence and it ended up being too much tool for our needs. I begrudgingly agreed to switch to GitHub issues and it ended up working very well for us.
• msupr 9y ago
  I'm pretty surprised to see so many people recommending post it notes or a whiteboard. Even if you aren't remote, people are going to have sick days or WFH days and "can you take a picture of the whiteboard for me" requests are nonsensical. Start with Trello. You can easily bend Trello to work with any productivity/PM system. Easy to get started and easy to evolve your process over time. Lots of great examples of how people are using it and some cool plugins to extend it. #1 is extremely easy to implement in Trello. #3 is definitely possible but takes some time and buy in.
• dannysu 9y ago
  Tools don't keep projects on track. Communication skills and project management skills keep projects on track. I believe the most important task is to teach your team members those project management skills. Teach them the skills to recognize unexpected events and know to communicate those bad news proactively. For example, an assigned task turned out to be much more difficult or larger scope than previously thought? Communicate. Uncertainty whether things can get done in time? Communicate. Feeling even the slightest uneasy about anything? Communicate. Understanding of the business goals? You have to teach it and make it clear. You're not gonna have a textbox, type it in and expect the team to just get it. There's a difference between reading something, and understanding something. Again, tools are "tools". No tool can allow your team to just be in zombie mode and not use their brain to think. Tools are there as an aid, not to fill in a hole in competencies. Choose whichever tool that works for you. Observe how your team members are doing and teach them the necessary skills as needed. At my company we've used simple Google doc, Asana, Trello, and now we're on JIRA. They all have pros and cons, but so far JIRA is working out alright and I think better than Trello.
  • vram22 9y ago
    >Tools don't keep projects on track. Communication skills and project management skills keep projects on track. Great comment. Good methods are more important than tools, to keep projects on track. As in, methods of doing things, not OOP methods. Tools, while they can be useful (though no panacea), are secondary, and also, some tools bind you into fixed ways of doing things, which may be a hindrance at times.
    • jwdunne 9y ago
      Another dark side to tools is that they are a vector for procrastination. You can convince yourself (or justify at least) that you need a new X and that's the answer. You'll spend a few hours evaluating various Xs. You might end up using it for a few days but then you quickly fall back to the tools you usually use. I've seen this with email clients, todo apps, project management tools, etc.
      • 9y ago
• smithkl42 9y ago
  I've successfully used Pivotal Tracker for my last three startups. It's an opinionated tool whose opinions don't always match mine, but it works well, and I've scaled it to teams up to about 15-20 participants. Beyond that, it seems to get bulky and hard to work with, but I don't know if that's so much a limitation with Pivotal, or with how I've tended to use it.
• vermooten 9y ago
  'On track'? Really? Dude it's 2017, not 1997.
• perlgeek 9y ago
  Most modern software development methodologies have elements to address your point 1. For example Scrum has daily standups that specifically inform every attendant about progress and blockers. Kanban mandates that you visualize your workflow with a board. Tracking the larger goals is often not well formalized, but I like this podcast episode about levels of planning in agile projects: http://deliveritcast.com/ep33-always-be-planning http://deliveritcast.com/ep33-always-be-planning. It's often included in frameworks for scaling scrum, like SAFE of scrum of scrums. 2. is a purely technical problem. If I remember correctly, stuff deployed to heroku corresponds to git branches, so it should be pretty easy to create some visualization about what's deployed right now from looking at git repos. I could be wrong here.
• tootie 9y ago
  Post-it notes are an absolutely terrible mechanism even for a small colocated team. Trello is barely sufficient. It's a digital task list, not project management. I'm sure everyone is deliberately thumbing their nose at enterprise tools like JIRA, but I consider it absolutely essential. Take the time to learn how to use it. Pick a workflow that works for you and just enforce discipline. It can do release management. Even in an automated way with Jenkins plugins. Pair it with bitbucket and you can create feature branches from the UI for each ticket. You can easily match commits to which feature they were for. I know there's also a lot of scorn for agile, but the core tenet is really just writing well-defined stories. Make each ticket the smallest possible feature with incremental value than can be built, tested and deployed. Then stack your tickets in priority order. Everything else about the process is for communication and visibility, but if you write your stories well, they are less important.
• astonex 9y ago
  At my job we use https://clubhouse.io https://clubhouse.io which is basically Trello but with a lot more helpful features We can see what everyone is working on just by looking at the stories in our 'in development' list which show who picked up that story. We can also group stories into epics and milestones to track progress towards larger goals
• eikenberry 9y ago
  I've worked on several remote teams and for keeping up with each other the best combo I've found is a daily chat based standup, optionally with a standup-bot. Along with a ticket tracking systems with an in-progress state + a dashboard layout that includes your teams in-progress stuff. For example my dashboard I has a 2 column layout, on the left top is my in-progress stuff and down the left side is the other team members in progress stuff. On the right top is my assigned tasks and below is monitored tasks. This layout is useful to me for tracking my work and I get to stay aware what the others are working on. It helps a lot to keep tickets small in scope, so you can rotate them fairly often. Of course what works depends on the nature of your teams work. Anyways, just some ideas.
  • batbomb 9y ago
    We have a stand up bot (geekbot). Coupled with a jira bot that posts-back ticket information if tickets are mentioned in the stand up, it makes for a good experience.
• klenwell 9y ago
  About a year ago, I took over a small team of 3 developers that was floundering and demoralized. This was not a remote team but I think that's incidental for the most part. I admit I'm writing this mainly as a testament to my own experience. But I think it includes some sound advice (a lot of which I collected from Hacker News discussions over the years.) Process is key. Tools should serve the process and the team. First thing I did was to put together a basic scrum process. This had an immediate positive impact that has persisted. Some recommendations: - Respect your team members. Give them the benefit of the doubt. There have been some good threads on HN about the distinction between being a dev and a manager.[0] - Short daily standups: no more than 10 minutes, just the three questions: Did? Doing? Blocks? We do them in-person in the office, but I also do them over email with some of our contractors. - Regular sprints (I like two-week sprints) with focused, structured demo, retrospective, and planning meetings. - Retrospective meetings with developers and product owners that identify pain points but emphasize fixing the process not blaming or fixing individuals. - One-on-one meetings every other week with members of my team and with my manager.[1] - Weekly grooming meetings: product owners and developers together review, size, and prioritize stories. - Projects are managed in Trello: cards are either user stories or defects with acceptance criteria. - Issues are tracked and documented (in Github). I set an example for my team by thoroughly documenting issues and emphasizing best practices. - Developers don't work on anything that doesn't have a Trello card (we have an action item card for small one-off tasks.) - No burndown charts! A lot of these practices I carried over from my previous job, where we used scrum but, because of laziness and laxity on a few points, ended up with a pretty dysfunctional team. My only real innovation was the "No Card/No Work" rule. I think it's essential. It both stops managers and stakeholders from derailing the process. And it provides a record and reference for the team's accomplishments. Coming into an existing team, I made sure I was flexible and accommodating in implementing the new process. But this is the one point on which I told my manager I needed to be firm. We agreed to leave a little bit of room in each sprint for any urgent stories that might come up. It's worked out well. Finally, my managers support and respect the process. Commitment was one of the keywords that was emphasized when I was first trained in Agile Scrum and I appreciate the significance of it now. Without the investment and commitment of management, this would probably all be futile. For larger goals, we created an Epic board that my manager likes to use with senior management. Trello is great because it visually reinforces the reality that priorities are a queue and if you push some urgent new job to the top, everything else in line is going to get pushed down and delayed. It's funny how easy it is for people on high or under stress to ignore that basic law of nature. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3407643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3407643 [1] https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/32765/what-is-the-purpose-of-1-on-1-meetings-with-your-direct-leader-boss https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/32765/what-is-...
• edimaudo 9y ago
  If you want to keep a software project on track, tools are secondary. The most important things are proper communication, good people management and some luck.
• billdybas 9y ago
  I echo others: effective communication and a motivated team are more important than any tool. I would add that visibility into what everyone else is working on is also super helpful to avoid stepping on other's toes or duplicating work. Once you've got communication down, you might find one of these tools useful: https://zube.io https://zube.io https://www.pivotaltracker.com https://www.pivotaltracker.com https://basecamp.com https://basecamp.com
• wikwocket 9y ago
  One micro-solution to the "what's deployed right now" problem is to have a health-check url for your app, which includes info like what git commit was used to create the current build, when it was deployed, and some basic application health info. You can monitor this for basic uptime monitoring and refer to it to sanity check which version is deployed. We do this at my place and it's super convenient.
• anotheryou 9y ago
  How do you guys manage large backlogs? Tiny bugs or nuances with low priority that just accumulate and are a pain to review again because you are not even sure they are still reproducable.
  • andreasklinger 9y ago
    Honest answer: > How do you guys manage large backlogs? Try not to. If PMs insist on logging ideas or keeping rejected projects i have a backlog board where ideas can have several stages. They can go from "spark of an idea" to "concrete details" there. In reality they go there to die > Tiny bugs or nuances with low priority. If they come from customers have a customer care person aggregate them and present a summary weekly or two weekly. Don't look at single events unless they seem important. > …that just accumulate and are a pain to review again because you are not even sure they are still reproducable. If they can't be reproduce remove it. Important stuff will pop up by itself.
    • rabidrat 9y ago
      Is there a way to have a backlog board with github issues?
      • PeterisP 9y ago
        Assign them to a milestone 'backlog', and have people filter the view so they see only the milestone(s) 'we will actually do this'.
• leipert 9y ago
  We are using Kanban with the help of JIRA. Took it a while to set it up, but the switch from OpenProject & Sprints was totally worth it. 1. How do we know what each other is working on? All of us (~15 people, 5 of which remote) participate in the daily at 10 o'clock. The daily takes around 15 min and it is focused on the stories and every one has a good overview on what is everyone doing. Other meetings are usually organized in the daily. Typically like A) "I have this and that problem with X, I would like to talk with B)" B) "Okay, let's talk after the daily." C) "I have also interest in this" Every day the daily is lead by another person. At the end of daily we ask questions regarding if everyone has enough/to much to do, knows what to do and so on. 2. How do we know what is currently deployed to production and staging? Version numbers ;) And Bamboo deployments. 3. Larger Goals Big releases every few months with planning directly after each release.
• sirrele 9y ago
  1. JIRA <------ This is what you are looking for.. 2. Testrail <3 QA + JIRA 3. Confluence <3 JIRA 4. OneNote [Mac's Desktop App > Window's :( ] 5. Slack + Git + JIRA + Screen Sharing + Emojis - Video Calls 6. SourceTree [Use when no one is looking] 7. MySQL Workbench Crashes When Mad | Hard to let go . . . . . . Write some damn scripts and automate it already!
• foodie_ 9y ago
  I'm honestly surprised no one has said it yet, but you shouldn't be thinking about tools at this stage. You should start on Monday and see what they are using, identify where it's not working and propose a solution. It's simply to early to think about the solution at this stage. (With that said I manage a remote team and we use kanban on trello, heroku and slack. We only meet as needed)
  • james-skemp 9y ago
    Second this. More than once I've heard that the best thing a new director can do is learn the current state of things for the first six months. Coming into a team as a new leader and changing things without learning about the team first isn't a good idea. Don't come up with fixes for imaginary, or the wrong, problems.
• ilaksh 9y ago
  Depends on the type of project. For small projects it mainly is about engagement and communication. They have to actually be around doing work and also have time set aside to communicate. They have to actually use the communication tools effectively. A lot of people actually are bad at online communication so you have to correct or work around that. If you are doing online everyone needs to be good at whatever online communication, or trying hard to be. And if most people are using Github issues for example, some people can't be doing their own thing on Skype if they overlap with the stuff on Github. Github. A chat tool with history. Phone calls or Skype or any voice tool. Make sure people are available for a minimum amount of time every day or few days to discuss things freely. For me I think it is counter-productive and just stressful to dump a big to-do list in any tool. Concentrate on the most important tasks for that week or two is how I do it.
• zentlim 9y ago
  I use bitbucket. Particularly for: (1) version control (2) issue tracking (3) wiki pages
• wheresvic1 9y ago
  If you are looking for something simple I can highly recommend Trello. It is very flexible - you can label tickets, assign them and you even have git integration!
• blipblop 9y ago
  I have found that revisiting the same documents during regular meetings works best. First starting at a high-level overview of the projects/milestones/deadlines/customers and then drilling down in the detail. > Know what each other are working on? (progress/blockers) a. Gantt chart = Asana + Instagantt - Instagantt is great. It allows you to create a Gantt chart from multiple Asana projects. I have an Asana project for each customer project with the deadlines/milestones. I also have a project for Ops/Refactoring "projects" (changing ORM, dockerizing, etc.), a project for Releases, and a project for Meetings. - I use to think Github could do everything but business-folk seem to struggle with it, and Asana is more flexible. Assigning tasks to people in Asana is great. b. Kanban board = Github + Zube To actually get things built we work in loose two week sprints. We create Github Issues for tasks we are working on usually keeping them quite broad as usually a lot of details emerge once we start working on them. We estimate time based on Planning Poker with the goal being to become better at estimating time and scoping tasks. > Know what is currently deployed to production and staging? (heroku) I've started keeping details of releases in Asana. Could also use Github Milestones. We feature freeze releases to a branch called `release/0.5.x`, when we ship we use a tag called `release-tag/0.5.0`, and then tag our deploys with `deploy/staging`, `deploy/prod`, or `deploy/<on-premise-customer-name>`. > Keep track of larger goals (milestones) We use a Gantt chart is visualise this, and usually some high-level strategy docs in Quip.
• cZuLi 9y ago
  Springloops - https://www.springloops.io/ https://www.springloops.io/
• ajax100 9y ago
  You should check out Standup, it makes it easy to track what everyone in your team has been working on: https://getstandup.com/ https://getstandup.com/
  • sencho 9y ago
    You should have picked www.getupstandup.com as the domain!
• camclay 9y ago
  Basecamp. Have tried Trello, and it's great for concisely scrumming specific small projects, but Basecamp's won us over with it's ability to manage multiple concurrent projects. Project Management (Campfires), ability to set To-Dos, keep track of Docs & Files, and look at a master schedule is awesome. You can quickly go from an overview to nitty gritty, and its easy to see what you and your team have accomplished.