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I have used many different project management tools - JIRA, GitHub Projects, Trello before it belonged to Atlassian, Trello after it belonged to Atlassian, Line

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.
- madrox 5y ago
  How to lose weight is very well understood, but new fad diets come out all the time.
- texasbigdata 5y ago
  Like Todo lists, or Todo iPhone apps, there's easy to make (potentially) + have a giant market aka everyone + approach a largely intractable problem (like weightloss, just perpetually non solveable problem spaces for most attemptees(
ryanbrunner 5y ago
I think there's two reasons to have a tool to track tasks: 1. To help ICs keep on top of what they need to do in a given week. I think your post is a great summary of that reason. The tool doesn't matter as much here - whatever has the least overall impact on developers is likely the best tool here. JIRA can be 'OK' at this, but it can very easily get slow or bureaucratic, largely due to - 2. To help communicate to stakeholders outside of Engineering. This can be a bunch of things - whether a project is on track, is the team performing more or less efficiently over time, are we managing the backlog appropriately. Sometimes this is a requirement imposed from elsewhere ("when will project X be done"), but sometimes it can be something that the engineering team wants to communicate to everyone else ("our bug backlog is becoming unsustainable and we'll hit a crisis point soon"). This tends to put pressure on reason 1 - whatever will give you more useful data for this is going to make actually using the tool more cumbersome. Over-emphasizing this tends to result in the JIRA nightmares everyone hates, but ignoring it leads to conflicts between engineering and other teams when they're viewed as unaccountable and haughty. For me, the sweet spot is Shortcut (used to be Clubhouse) - it's a very smooth UX that gets out of your way, but still offers some pretty decent reporting and analysis, and doesn't let you get too crazy with overconfiguring things so it always feels pretty snappy and gets out of your way.

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.
madrox 5y ago
How to lose weight is very well understood, but new fad diets come out all the time.
texasbigdata 5y ago
Like Todo lists, or Todo iPhone apps, there's easy to make (potentially) + have a giant market aka everyone + approach a largely intractable problem (like weightloss, just perpetually non solveable problem spaces for most attemptees(

ryanbrunner 5y ago

I think there's two reasons to have a tool to track tasks: 1. To help ICs keep on top of what they need to do in a given week. I think your post is a great summary of that reason. The tool doesn't matter as much here - whatever has the least overall impact on developers is likely the best tool here. JIRA can be 'OK' at this, but it can very easily get slow or bureaucratic, largely due to - 2. To help communicate to stakeholders outside of Engineering. This can be a bunch of things - whether a project is on track, is the team performing more or less efficiently over time, are we managing the backlog appropriately. Sometimes this is a requirement imposed from elsewhere ("when will project X be done"), but sometimes it can be something that the engineering team wants to communicate to everyone else ("our bug backlog is becoming unsustainable and we'll hit a crisis point soon"). This tends to put pressure on reason 1 - whatever will give you more useful data for this is going to make actually using the tool more cumbersome. Over-emphasizing this tends to result in the JIRA nightmares everyone hates, but ignoring it leads to conflicts between engineering and other teams when they're viewed as unaccountable and haughty. For me, the sweet spot is Shortcut (used to be Clubhouse) - it's a very smooth UX that gets out of your way, but still offers some pretty decent reporting and analysis, and doesn't let you get too crazy with overconfiguring things so it always feels pretty snappy and gets out of your way.