8 ms·

GitHub Projects – Customizable, flexible tool for planning and tracking work

165 points by gilad 5y ago

leetrout 5y ago
I am not affiliated in any way but we used GitHub projects at my last gig and transitioned to ZenHub and finally Linear and didn't look back. Cannot say enough good things about Linear.
- sagivo 5y ago
  What was the added value?
  - leetrout 5y ago
    It is extremely fast and has a great set of features. The UI / UX can be a bit unintuitive until you spend some time with it. Never realized how slow other things were until using linear and was blown away.
- nnf 5y ago
  I’ve been using Linear as well for the past several months, and I’ve been really impressed with the speed and quality of software updates. It works great in the standalone app and in a browser. And for my needs, the free plan is plenty.
- kareemm 5y ago
  Curious about Linear. Currently using Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse). Anybody used both Linear and Clubhouse/Shortcut? Curious what the main differences are - Shortcut is a good product.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    A tangent, but whatever those companies or services are is completely indecipherable from the names.
    - d3nj4l 5y ago
      Neither is JIRA but that didn’t stop it from eating the world.
- jnathsf 5y ago
  We looked at Linear and decided on Kitemaker[0] as their core thesis is enabling collaboration with eng and product (and other stakeholders). The team does daily deployments and like Linear they focus on speed and hotkeys. [0] https://kitemaker.co https://kitemaker.co
  - SigKill9 5y ago
    Thanks for the shoutout :)
- carlosdp 5y ago
  Yea we've been using Linear for almost a year, it's an excellent product. Basically think Superhuman for JIRA. Very clean, not overcomplicated, great keyboard support.
  - dgellow 5y ago
    JIRA has a quite good keyboard support once you find the "." (dot) menu: press the . key, for example after selecting tasks or when looking at one, it opens a menu with autocompletion. This feature alone makes JIRA way more bearable for me, you can become really quick once you learn the correct keyword to complete for!
- fuzzythinker 5y ago
  link: https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/
t3e 5y ago
I talk to dev team leaders (EMs and PMs) multiple times a week about project management and it's quite rare that we find anyone using GitHub apart from very small teams (2-3 devs). Our research suggests product managers especially tend to prefer things like Notion/Trello and really don't like the complexity of GitHub. Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Constructor (constructor.dev)
- Devagamster 5y ago
  Thats a disappointing trend. I personally like github for project management explicitly because it offers more features and options (and they are continuing to improve it)
- truted2 5y ago
  How do you account for the popularity of JIRA? (It’s quite complex)
  - t3e 5y ago
    Jira offers them much more in the way of process management, reporting, and integrations with the likes of ZenDesk for its complexity. They seem to think of GitHub as just for the coders and aren't comfortable there.
  - edoceo 5y ago
    Jira also has momentum. I've advised at least a dozen places on, or moving to Jira (I was in for a different project but watched it). The reasons I heard were: new CTO had it at the old place, waits it here; and everyone uses it. Many of those startups also didn't have a Jira expert and soon got tangled in workflow automation that mostly got in the way for small, growth phase companies.
  - igetspam 5y ago
    Accounting for the use of Jira is easy: known quantity and name recognition. A better question is "With so many unhappy customers, how do we still account for the continued use of Jira as an org matures?" It's the same answer but with the additional caveat that learning a new tool that's so fundamental is disruptive. I consult and advise multiple orgs and have done so for years. I don't often encounter heavy supporters of atlassian products, despite the number of users. Jira is one of those things that flies in the face of most UX logic in that it doesn't appear to lose market share, no matter how much slower, unreliable, inflexible and generally unliked it is. It seems that once a founder has grabbed the first thing off the shelf, you're stuck. Full disclosure: I have no competitive interests in this space, I just hate garbage tools. (Apologies to my actual friends who work at atlassian. Your software is terrible.)
kvark 5y ago
The old (non-beta) projects were quite useful as a simple kanban board integrated with Github. We used it in Firefox Graphics team with limited success. We use it actively in WebGPU group, and it works well for scoping the work for meetings. I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface of what can be done, especially with the new Projects. Excited to see how it’s going to work!
petarb 5y ago
We’ve been using the beta for about six months now and have really enjoyed having everything in one place. I don’t miss Jira. The GH team listens to feedback and is consistently adding new features. I would give it a try if you’re on the fence.
- dovyski 5y ago
  I second that. It has a limited feature set, which makes you focus on what matters. It is not like Jira that buries you in tons of options and information. Definitely give GitHub projects a go.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    > Definitely give GitHub projects a go. Now how do I convince my bosses to do so..?
    - dovyski 5y ago
      That's a though one, but I think you can start with what matters the most: cost. If you show that a tool: - will make developers happier (for me, GitHub is far superior than gitlab/bitbucket regarding tooling, e.g. actions, review, etc); - is simpler to use, so it reduces management overhead; - is friendly to non-dev teams, again reducing cooperation friction; It will likely reduce costs overall. It might be by shipping faster (or better, or more robustly, or more homogeneously at least). My personal take is that management people use Jira and alike because they read it is the "right" tool. Their motives might be weaker than you think.
      - mason55 5y ago
        The bigger problem is if you are already in Jira. Any kind of tracking tool switchover is going to be a huge undertaking. We have lots of complaints about Jira but any time we consider moving it’s never worth the effort.
        5y ago
qmmmur 5y ago
We're using the projects beta in our team of five. https://github.com/orgs/flucoma/projects/1 https://github.com/orgs/flucoma/projects/1 I really like the way that you can have multiple view on the same set of issues and PRS.
- mkurz 5y ago
  The link to your project is private.
mtlynch 5y ago
Neat! I manage a project that spans several repos, so I've been looking for a good solution for this. I really just want something that lets me prioritize Github issues from different repos. I tried Github Projects a few months ago, and I don't recall the issue, but I couldn't find any obvious way of adding issues to a project from the issue itself rather than from the project view. I've been using CodeTree, which does the job, but it feels stupid paying $50/mo for a SaaS whose whole job is to just show me a list of Github issues. Especially because I haven't seen any product development at all in the year that I've been paying for it. I tried Linear, and I didn't get what all the fuss was about. It's pretty, but I found it unintuitive, and it seems like it wants to be the authoritative store for bugs and tasks, when I wanted to keep them in Github and just have different views of them. It looks like this latest iteration of Github Projects offers enough for me to migrate away from CodeTree and save myself the $50/month.
- Sujan 5y ago
  > but I couldn't find any obvious way of adding issues to a project from the issue itself rather than from the project view. You can add issues to the old Projects from the issue view the same way as the new Projects (beta), it just takes 2/3 clicks for both: On the right sidebar in your issue you have "Projects", then a dropdown of your projects, and then you can (optionally) select the column where to place them (without that selection, the land in some kind of inbox inside the board). I am using CodeTree for the list view of issues in milestones. The new Projects (beta) unfortunately also only offers that via the in between step of manually adding issues to a project and then "tagging" them with the milestone again as an attribute I think :/
  - mtlynch 5y ago
    Oh maybe that was the issue I ran into. If I just create a new project for each milestone instead of using the milestone field, I think GitHub Projects will do what I need.
monkeynotes 5y ago
Makes me realize how much I hate Jira. GitHub now covers a lot of Jira's functionality, Confluence to an extent also.
- EscargotCult 5y ago
  > Confluence to an extent also without using a vendor-specific markup format, too!
  - igetspam 5y ago
    But that wysiwyg. So bad. How could you not want to be vendor locked into it? (Sarcasm)
- threeseed 5y ago
  > GitHub now covers a lot of Jira's functionality No it doesn't. Github Issues/Projects replicates about 10% of Jira. Maybe basic issue tracking is fine for your use case. But if you have multiple teams or need to do planning across longer time horizons e.g. SAFE then this is where Jira comes into its own.
edoceo 5y ago
This post is about GitHub but I'd like to shout out GitLab projects. It's good for my small team, we moved off Trello to that. Issues list and a simple board for visualization
annexrichmond 5y ago
Tangential but it seems like many web apps shown on HN feature a plethora of emojis. I feel like it's overused, lazy development, and therefore hurts the identity of the app when it shares the same suite of "icons" as so many other sites. At one point they were cute, but I see them absolutely everywhere now and they frankly look juvenile sometimes
- mpalmer 5y ago
  I'm not sure how many people will step over the line you've drawn. Offensive as it is to certain sensibilities, there's a reason so many people and products keep using "the same suite of icons". And really, it's usually all just user-generated content. Has GitHub even done any "lazy development" here, or are they just entering emoji in regular text fields?
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  Alternate take: I like them. Quick way to visually convey meaning and emotion. Don't have to develop your own. And they are native & work inline in text with no need to size or layout images. Or load another font of your icons.
  - annexrichmond 5y ago
    Oh 100% but those are reasons to like them as a developer, not as a user :)
alberth 5y ago
Is this the same as GitHub Projects https://github.com/features/issues https://github.com/features/issues ?
dave_aiello 5y ago
I just saw GitHub Projects for the first time as a result of this link. It looks like it has several of the key features of Asana, which is the project management tool that my very small web publishing consulting firm uses. I noticed that Project Boards (https://docs.github.com/en/issues/organizing-your-work-with-project-boards/managing-project-boards/about-project-boards https://docs.github.com/en/issues/organizing-your-work-with-...) visually look a lot like the Board view in Asana when I'm working in a project based on the IT Project Plan template. In terms of whether companies that are inclined to use web-based project management tools would drop what they are using and adopt GitHub Projects, I think the most likely candidates to do that would be companies where a great deal of the creative work already flows through GitHub and a huge percentage of the staff is in GitHub for some reason every day. I don't think we would adopt this for work with clients. To the extent that our clients have GitHub as part of their toolset, the only people using it are software developers and engineers on the system administration - devops continuum. Our use of Asana is for things like project communications and high level time management, i.e. when will we hit a milestone.
closed 5y ago
I've been working on using github projects beta for the past couple months. I'm super excited for it, but right now it's hard to use because because it lacks basic features. Things projects have that beta projects don't: * No easy way to automatically add issues from a repo to your project. You have to add them one by one, or use the graphql API, which lacks batch operations. * No issue preview on the board. Basic feature missing from sheet view: * You can't sort issues along the dimensions available in a repo's issue tab (e.g. newest, oldest, recently updated). I thought I must have been missing something, until I realized that github's public roadmap repo itself uses a bot to add issues [0]. There's an issue there listing out the parity items [1], which will be super handy! [0]: https://github.com/orgs/github/projects/4247/views/1 https://github.com/orgs/github/projects/4247/views/1 [1]: https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/287 https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/287
- joegahona 5y ago
  Our team is really struggling with Projects for these and many other reasons. The most annoying thing is they hijack CMD+F to use their command-line-like filter, which prevents me from quickly finding words that I want to see on the page. There's also no way to just simply make a ticket from the board itself, and the main value prop of using a Github product -- keeping Engineers in the Github environment without having to have multiple tabs opened -- is completely wiped out by Projects opening a new tab for anything you click on. Not impressed so far.
- dralley 5y ago
  > * No easy way to automatically add issues from a repo to your project. You have to add them one by one, or use the graphql API, which lacks batch operations. Yup. I spent an hour evaluating it last weekend, and this is where I stopped. It's difficult to make good use out of so many of the features when there's no way to bulk-add issues to the project tracker.
  - drcongo 5y ago
    I got really excited for this when they previewed it a while back but the thing we got just feels like a hobbled spreadsheet with a lot of usability issues.
lyime 5y ago
I love the airtable'fucation of all list/table style UI. Starting to see a lot of projects built around that design pattern.
liketochill 5y ago
Looks quite similar to “tasks by planner” in ms teams
zomglings 5y ago
I have used many different project management tools - JIRA, GitHub Projects, Trello before it belonged to Atlassian, Trello after it belonged to Atlassian, Linear, Buganizer at Google, etc. etc. etc. I have used these tools as a member of small teams (~ 5 people), a member of large teams (~ 30 people), a manager of small teams (~ 4 people), and a manager of large teams (~ 20 people). I have come to the conclusion that the tool doesn't matter. The team does. The best thing to do is to keep the size of your teams small enough that people can map their work and the work adjacent to them in their heads. That is generally amazing for productivity. Expanding the scope that people have to be aware of to make progress... that's poison for productivity. After I realized this, I have never spent an additional moment bitching about my project management tool. These days, I just use a Google Doc but JIRA is a prefectly good tool TBH. I like GitHub projects because my team only builds open source software and we see it as a way of communicating our road map and priorities to our users and our customers. However, we have found it less ergonomic than JIRA or Google Docs. We have settled on just using GitHub issues and weekly updates in our Discord. I have tried Linear and it didn't leave me impressed. Not a black mark against them, though, as this is a space where you have to be orders of magnitude better than your entrenched competition because of the inertia inherent to teams already having content on the older platforms. I can just say with confidence that they aren't an order of magnitude better than Google Docs.
- omniscient_oce 5y ago
  Yet it seems like another issue tracker is being developed and advertised every year. Is there something missing in these tools that spurs people to keep making more?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    Another issue tracker is being developed and advertised every year, because all the existing ones obviously suck. _Clearly_ this is a software problem that needs technical fix. But it isn't. As the parent notes: "the tool doesn't matter. The team does" Many times I have wanted to burn JIRA to the ground, but the fact of the matter is that if that happened, the org would simply re-create dysfunctional processes in another tool and then blame that tool.
91edec 5y ago
It is very frustrating that you can't set a default repo for issues to be created in for a project. Every single time you convert a draft to an issue you have to select a repo from a drop down of all possible repos you have available. A simple solution is just to remember the last issue repo you created and put that at the top of the list.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
The problem is the future. Project Mgmt should at best be where are we now, and how did we get here. You can then use that to guesstimate how long the next steps might take. You can get all that out of your commit logs and tests. Project Mgmt should not be about telling people what to do, but telling them they are doing the wrong thing.
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  A theory of Software Project Management: Working Features are all that matters. Working Features can be measured through automated tests. A Working Feature is complete if the set of tests that "verify" it are passing. The tests are tagged as verifying that feature, and likely include integration, performance and UI tests as well as unit. Honestly it does not matter if the tests are written before or after the code. (Its really hard to write tests for a UI element that does not exist yet.) How can I tell if people are working on the feature I want them to? You can read the code. But otherwise you cant.
thenerdhead 5y ago
The tool should be shaped around the team's best way of working. The problem is that everyone thinks project/backlog organization is the silver bullet to getting things done. It's not. What they don't realize is that too much process or too little process can make or break team's autonomy. I like GitHub projects. It is simple, Airtable/Notion inspired, and makes it very easy to see a backlog like a spreadsheet. The views are especially helpful for different projects, statuses, and dependencies. The best part about it? It's native to teams who work exclusively in GitHub. I work on a suite of GitHub OSS repos, and this tool alone looks extremely promising. Even using the beta for a few months now has helped me put everything in one place with many views instead of having to use alternatives like ZenHub. I do everything in the open and need solutions that can be transparent with the very communities I build for. This is looking good despite the bugs like editing titles in projects beta changes the issue's title on keystroke. It makes it quite easy to quickly create new issues and manage them from a single screen on the web. Big fan so far.
zonofthor 5y ago
Seems they've just wrapped Issues with a container having metadata. Useful yes but not until they preview Issue content in the cards themselves - useless when you have to open Issue externally to view it.

165 points by gilad 5y ago

I am not affiliated in any way but we used GitHub projects at my last gig and transitioned to ZenHub and finally Linear and didn't look back. Cannot say enough good things about Linear.

sagivo 5y ago
What was the added value?
- leetrout 5y ago
  It is extremely fast and has a great set of features. The UI / UX can be a bit unintuitive until you spend some time with it. Never realized how slow other things were until using linear and was blown away.
nnf 5y ago
I’ve been using Linear as well for the past several months, and I’ve been really impressed with the speed and quality of software updates. It works great in the standalone app and in a browser. And for my needs, the free plan is plenty.
kareemm 5y ago
Curious about Linear. Currently using Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse). Anybody used both Linear and Clubhouse/Shortcut? Curious what the main differences are - Shortcut is a good product.
- nefitty 5y ago
  A tangent, but whatever those companies or services are is completely indecipherable from the names.
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    Neither is JIRA but that didn’t stop it from eating the world.
jnathsf 5y ago
We looked at Linear and decided on Kitemaker[0] as their core thesis is enabling collaboration with eng and product (and other stakeholders). The team does daily deployments and like Linear they focus on speed and hotkeys. [0] https://kitemaker.co https://kitemaker.co
- SigKill9 5y ago
  Thanks for the shoutout :)
carlosdp 5y ago
Yea we've been using Linear for almost a year, it's an excellent product. Basically think Superhuman for JIRA. Very clean, not overcomplicated, great keyboard support.
- dgellow 5y ago
  JIRA has a quite good keyboard support once you find the "." (dot) menu: press the . key, for example after selecting tasks or when looking at one, it opens a menu with autocompletion. This feature alone makes JIRA way more bearable for me, you can become really quick once you learn the correct keyword to complete for!
fuzzythinker 5y ago
link: https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/

t3e 5y ago

I talk to dev team leaders (EMs and PMs) multiple times a week about project management and it's quite rare that we find anyone using GitHub apart from very small teams (2-3 devs). Our research suggests product managers especially tend to prefer things like Notion/Trello and really don't like the complexity of GitHub. Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Constructor (constructor.dev)

Devagamster 5y ago
Thats a disappointing trend. I personally like github for project management explicitly because it offers more features and options (and they are continuing to improve it)
truted2 5y ago
How do you account for the popularity of JIRA? (It’s quite complex)
- t3e 5y ago
  Jira offers them much more in the way of process management, reporting, and integrations with the likes of ZenDesk for its complexity. They seem to think of GitHub as just for the coders and aren't comfortable there.
- edoceo 5y ago
  Jira also has momentum. I've advised at least a dozen places on, or moving to Jira (I was in for a different project but watched it). The reasons I heard were: new CTO had it at the old place, waits it here; and everyone uses it. Many of those startups also didn't have a Jira expert and soon got tangled in workflow automation that mostly got in the way for small, growth phase companies.
- igetspam 5y ago
  Accounting for the use of Jira is easy: known quantity and name recognition. A better question is "With so many unhappy customers, how do we still account for the continued use of Jira as an org matures?" It's the same answer but with the additional caveat that learning a new tool that's so fundamental is disruptive. I consult and advise multiple orgs and have done so for years. I don't often encounter heavy supporters of atlassian products, despite the number of users. Jira is one of those things that flies in the face of most UX logic in that it doesn't appear to lose market share, no matter how much slower, unreliable, inflexible and generally unliked it is. It seems that once a founder has grabbed the first thing off the shelf, you're stuck. Full disclosure: I have no competitive interests in this space, I just hate garbage tools. (Apologies to my actual friends who work at atlassian. Your software is terrible.)

kvark 5y ago

The old (non-beta) projects were quite useful as a simple kanban board integrated with Github. We used it in Firefox Graphics team with limited success. We use it actively in WebGPU group, and it works well for scoping the work for meetings. I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface of what can be done, especially with the new Projects. Excited to see how it’s going to work!

petarb 5y ago

We’ve been using the beta for about six months now and have really enjoyed having everything in one place. I don’t miss Jira. The GH team listens to feedback and is consistently adding new features. I would give it a try if you’re on the fence.

dovyski 5y ago
I second that. It has a limited feature set, which makes you focus on what matters. It is not like Jira that buries you in tons of options and information. Definitely give GitHub projects a go.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  > Definitely give GitHub projects a go. Now how do I convince my bosses to do so..?
  - dovyski 5y ago
    That's a though one, but I think you can start with what matters the most: cost. If you show that a tool: - will make developers happier (for me, GitHub is far superior than gitlab/bitbucket regarding tooling, e.g. actions, review, etc); - is simpler to use, so it reduces management overhead; - is friendly to non-dev teams, again reducing cooperation friction; It will likely reduce costs overall. It might be by shipping faster (or better, or more robustly, or more homogeneously at least). My personal take is that management people use Jira and alike because they read it is the "right" tool. Their motives might be weaker than you think.
    - mason55 5y ago
      The bigger problem is if you are already in Jira. Any kind of tracking tool switchover is going to be a huge undertaking. We have lots of complaints about Jira but any time we consider moving it’s never worth the effort.
      - 5y ago

qmmmur 5y ago

We're using the projects beta in our team of five. https://github.com/orgs/flucoma/projects/1 https://github.com/orgs/flucoma/projects/1 I really like the way that you can have multiple view on the same set of issues and PRS.

mkurz 5y ago
The link to your project is private.

mtlynch 5y ago

Neat! I manage a project that spans several repos, so I've been looking for a good solution for this. I really just want something that lets me prioritize Github issues from different repos. I tried Github Projects a few months ago, and I don't recall the issue, but I couldn't find any obvious way of adding issues to a project from the issue itself rather than from the project view. I've been using CodeTree, which does the job, but it feels stupid paying $50/mo for a SaaS whose whole job is to just show me a list of Github issues. Especially because I haven't seen any product development at all in the year that I've been paying for it. I tried Linear, and I didn't get what all the fuss was about. It's pretty, but I found it unintuitive, and it seems like it wants to be the authoritative store for bugs and tasks, when I wanted to keep them in Github and just have different views of them. It looks like this latest iteration of Github Projects offers enough for me to migrate away from CodeTree and save myself the $50/month.

Sujan 5y ago
> but I couldn't find any obvious way of adding issues to a project from the issue itself rather than from the project view. You can add issues to the old Projects from the issue view the same way as the new Projects (beta), it just takes 2/3 clicks for both: On the right sidebar in your issue you have "Projects", then a dropdown of your projects, and then you can (optionally) select the column where to place them (without that selection, the land in some kind of inbox inside the board). I am using CodeTree for the list view of issues in milestones. The new Projects (beta) unfortunately also only offers that via the in between step of manually adding issues to a project and then "tagging" them with the milestone again as an attribute I think :/
- mtlynch 5y ago
  Oh maybe that was the issue I ran into. If I just create a new project for each milestone instead of using the milestone field, I think GitHub Projects will do what I need.

monkeynotes 5y ago

Makes me realize how much I hate Jira. GitHub now covers a lot of Jira's functionality, Confluence to an extent also.

EscargotCult 5y ago
> Confluence to an extent also without using a vendor-specific markup format, too!
- igetspam 5y ago
  But that wysiwyg. So bad. How could you not want to be vendor locked into it? (Sarcasm)
threeseed 5y ago
> GitHub now covers a lot of Jira's functionality No it doesn't. Github Issues/Projects replicates about 10% of Jira. Maybe basic issue tracking is fine for your use case. But if you have multiple teams or need to do planning across longer time horizons e.g. SAFE then this is where Jira comes into its own.

edoceo 5y ago

This post is about GitHub but I'd like to shout out GitLab projects. It's good for my small team, we moved off Trello to that. Issues list and a simple board for visualization

annexrichmond 5y ago

Tangential but it seems like many web apps shown on HN feature a plethora of emojis. I feel like it's overused, lazy development, and therefore hurts the identity of the app when it shares the same suite of "icons" as so many other sites. At one point they were cute, but I see them absolutely everywhere now and they frankly look juvenile sometimes

mpalmer 5y ago
I'm not sure how many people will step over the line you've drawn. Offensive as it is to certain sensibilities, there's a reason so many people and products keep using "the same suite of icons". And really, it's usually all just user-generated content. Has GitHub even done any "lazy development" here, or are they just entering emoji in regular text fields?
dillondoyle 5y ago
Alternate take: I like them. Quick way to visually convey meaning and emotion. Don't have to develop your own. And they are native & work inline in text with no need to size or layout images. Or load another font of your icons.
- annexrichmond 5y ago
  Oh 100% but those are reasons to like them as a developer, not as a user :)

alberth 5y ago

Is this the same as GitHub Projects https://github.com/features/issues https://github.com/features/issues ?

dave_aiello 5y ago

I just saw GitHub Projects for the first time as a result of this link. It looks like it has several of the key features of Asana, which is the project management tool that my very small web publishing consulting firm uses. I noticed that Project Boards (https://docs.github.com/en/issues/organizing-your-work-with-project-boards/managing-project-boards/about-project-boards https://docs.github.com/en/issues/organizing-your-work-with-...) visually look a lot like the Board view in Asana when I'm working in a project based on the IT Project Plan template. In terms of whether companies that are inclined to use web-based project management tools would drop what they are using and adopt GitHub Projects, I think the most likely candidates to do that would be companies where a great deal of the creative work already flows through GitHub and a huge percentage of the staff is in GitHub for some reason every day. I don't think we would adopt this for work with clients. To the extent that our clients have GitHub as part of their toolset, the only people using it are software developers and engineers on the system administration - devops continuum. Our use of Asana is for things like project communications and high level time management, i.e. when will we hit a milestone.

closed 5y ago

I've been working on using github projects beta for the past couple months. I'm super excited for it, but right now it's hard to use because because it lacks basic features. Things projects have that beta projects don't: * No easy way to automatically add issues from a repo to your project. You have to add them one by one, or use the graphql API, which lacks batch operations. * No issue preview on the board. Basic feature missing from sheet view: * You can't sort issues along the dimensions available in a repo's issue tab (e.g. newest, oldest, recently updated). I thought I must have been missing something, until I realized that github's public roadmap repo itself uses a bot to add issues [0]. There's an issue there listing out the parity items [1], which will be super handy! [0]: https://github.com/orgs/github/projects/4247/views/1 https://github.com/orgs/github/projects/4247/views/1 [1]: https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/287 https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/287

joegahona 5y ago
Our team is really struggling with Projects for these and many other reasons. The most annoying thing is they hijack CMD+F to use their command-line-like filter, which prevents me from quickly finding words that I want to see on the page. There's also no way to just simply make a ticket from the board itself, and the main value prop of using a Github product -- keeping Engineers in the Github environment without having to have multiple tabs opened -- is completely wiped out by Projects opening a new tab for anything you click on. Not impressed so far.
dralley 5y ago
> * No easy way to automatically add issues from a repo to your project. You have to add them one by one, or use the graphql API, which lacks batch operations. Yup. I spent an hour evaluating it last weekend, and this is where I stopped. It's difficult to make good use out of so many of the features when there's no way to bulk-add issues to the project tracker.
- drcongo 5y ago
  I got really excited for this when they previewed it a while back but the thing we got just feels like a hobbled spreadsheet with a lot of usability issues.

lyime 5y ago

I love the airtable'fucation of all list/table style UI. Starting to see a lot of projects built around that design pattern.

liketochill 5y ago

Looks quite similar to “tasks by planner” in ms teams

zomglings 5y ago

I have used many different project management tools - JIRA, GitHub Projects, Trello before it belonged to Atlassian, Trello after it belonged to Atlassian, Linear, Buganizer at Google, etc. etc. etc. I have used these tools as a member of small teams (~ 5 people), a member of large teams (~ 30 people), a manager of small teams (~ 4 people), and a manager of large teams (~ 20 people). I have come to the conclusion that the tool doesn't matter. The team does. The best thing to do is to keep the size of your teams small enough that people can map their work and the work adjacent to them in their heads. That is generally amazing for productivity. Expanding the scope that people have to be aware of to make progress... that's poison for productivity. After I realized this, I have never spent an additional moment bitching about my project management tool. These days, I just use a Google Doc but JIRA is a prefectly good tool TBH. I like GitHub projects because my team only builds open source software and we see it as a way of communicating our road map and priorities to our users and our customers. However, we have found it less ergonomic than JIRA or Google Docs. We have settled on just using GitHub issues and weekly updates in our Discord. I have tried Linear and it didn't leave me impressed. Not a black mark against them, though, as this is a space where you have to be orders of magnitude better than your entrenched competition because of the inertia inherent to teams already having content on the older platforms. I can just say with confidence that they aren't an order of magnitude better than Google Docs.

omniscient_oce 5y ago
Yet it seems like another issue tracker is being developed and advertised every year. Is there something missing in these tools that spurs people to keep making more?
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  Another issue tracker is being developed and advertised every year, because all the existing ones obviously suck. _Clearly_ this is a software problem that needs technical fix. But it isn't. As the parent notes: "the tool doesn't matter. The team does" Many times I have wanted to burn JIRA to the ground, but the fact of the matter is that if that happened, the org would simply re-create dysfunctional processes in another tool and then blame that tool.

91edec 5y ago

It is very frustrating that you can't set a default repo for issues to be created in for a project. Every single time you convert a draft to an issue you have to select a repo from a drop down of all possible repos you have available. A simple solution is just to remember the last issue repo you created and put that at the top of the list.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

The problem is the future. Project Mgmt should at best be where are we now, and how did we get here. You can then use that to guesstimate how long the next steps might take. You can get all that out of your commit logs and tests. Project Mgmt should not be about telling people what to do, but telling them they are doing the wrong thing.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
A theory of Software Project Management: Working Features are all that matters. Working Features can be measured through automated tests. A Working Feature is complete if the set of tests that "verify" it are passing. The tests are tagged as verifying that feature, and likely include integration, performance and UI tests as well as unit. Honestly it does not matter if the tests are written before or after the code. (Its really hard to write tests for a UI element that does not exist yet.) How can I tell if people are working on the feature I want them to? You can read the code. But otherwise you cant.

thenerdhead 5y ago

The tool should be shaped around the team's best way of working. The problem is that everyone thinks project/backlog organization is the silver bullet to getting things done. It's not. What they don't realize is that too much process or too little process can make or break team's autonomy. I like GitHub projects. It is simple, Airtable/Notion inspired, and makes it very easy to see a backlog like a spreadsheet. The views are especially helpful for different projects, statuses, and dependencies. The best part about it? It's native to teams who work exclusively in GitHub. I work on a suite of GitHub OSS repos, and this tool alone looks extremely promising. Even using the beta for a few months now has helped me put everything in one place with many views instead of having to use alternatives like ZenHub. I do everything in the open and need solutions that can be transparent with the very communities I build for. This is looking good despite the bugs like editing titles in projects beta changes the issue's title on keystroke. It makes it quite easy to quickly create new issues and manage them from a single screen on the web. Big fan so far.

zonofthor 5y ago

Seems they've just wrapped Issues with a container having metadata. Useful yes but not until they preview Issue content in the cards themselves - useless when you have to open Issue externally to view it.