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Has anyone used the github projects/issues as a replacement to tools like jira? I used gitlab issues in a previous role, and it did not work out that well. Ther

Has anyone used the github projects/issues as a replacement to tools like jira? I used gitlab issues in a previous role, and it did not work out that well. There was quite a bit of push back from my PM and we ended up using trello in the end. Edit: I like the idea, I just wonder if its a viable solution when you have more than 1 team with engineering/product collaborating in github/gitlab on issues.

deleted 3y ago
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lstamour 3y ago
The new Projects is like Jira without the top-down “Jira Align”-style features. So you can have issues from multiple projects show up in a board, that board can look like Trello… but if you want to duplicate the card’s custom fields to a different board, it gets trickier. The card and its data lives in the board it’s created in. You end up having to do lots and lots of hacky things with GitHub Actions and the Projects GraphQL API to make it work the way you want it to. And granted, it’s cool you can do that. Having CI events fire for every issue created is awesome. But sometimes you fight their defaults soooo much, that just customizing Jira seems easier at times. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re all in on GitHub, you’ll do okay with it. Especially if you write Actions to feed data in or out of it using the GitHub CLI and/or API or GitHub-script CI actions. But you’ll also probably miss Jira if you’ve used it as a power-user. Especially if you want to do advanced things with boards and cards and issues that it might not offer by default out of the box. And GitHub’s GraphQL API is powerful but also weirdly and frustratingly restrictive at times, particularly with usage and query limits. An easy SQL query for GitHub to run internally is opaque and confusing for a third-party to develop - GitHub knows what things are easy to hard to query by design but outside of GitHub you just make the API calls and hope it scales well to larger projects, or find out the hard way when it fails.
sshine 3y ago
Yes, I started using it 6 months ago. We only have one team of 5 developers. Compared to Jira, it is not gut-wrenching terrible. My employer's project manager left the month after I started, so I took over his overview. I switched from Jira to GitHub Projects because I value my life as a developer. It's not as feature rich, but that's a feature. The integration with PRs and commits is top class. Projects can span multiple repositories, which is neat. We are mostly mono-repo, but we do have one active project using a different set of technologies. I have one long-lived project for getting our main product ready, containing several milestones, some of which have deadlines yet to be determined, some deadlines stretching 6 months into delivery. I use the kanban board for keeping track of what my colleagues are working on, and for measuring how much is left. I don't use the roadmap feature, because my employer has a time estimation problem right now, but it looks very neat. I use a "tracking issue" label that just lists other issues. For example, a tracking issue for a particular customer. I really like how doing "- #123" in an issue or PR expands that into the title and an icon indicating if it was open or closed. This is just standard GitHub functionality, but it's super. Sometimes tracking issues are created from doing a customer integration test, where a failed test is converted into a task. But until they're a separate issue, they're just a bullet point in the tracking issue. I'd like to be able to export an interactive overview of a subset of issues for customers to look at between meetings (which is possible to make with GitHub's API). But it's not strictly necessary, as screenshares / screendumps of the issue tracker is typically fine.
porridgeraisin 3y ago
github issues as a database. Actions have the backend logic. Search is useful as well.

deleted 3y ago

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lstamour 3y ago

The new Projects is like Jira without the top-down “Jira Align”-style features. So you can have issues from multiple projects show up in a board, that board can look like Trello… but if you want to duplicate the card’s custom fields to a different board, it gets trickier. The card and its data lives in the board it’s created in. You end up having to do lots and lots of hacky things with GitHub Actions and the Projects GraphQL API to make it work the way you want it to. And granted, it’s cool you can do that. Having CI events fire for every issue created is awesome. But sometimes you fight their defaults soooo much, that just customizing Jira seems easier at times. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re all in on GitHub, you’ll do okay with it. Especially if you write Actions to feed data in or out of it using the GitHub CLI and/or API or GitHub-script CI actions. But you’ll also probably miss Jira if you’ve used it as a power-user. Especially if you want to do advanced things with boards and cards and issues that it might not offer by default out of the box. And GitHub’s GraphQL API is powerful but also weirdly and frustratingly restrictive at times, particularly with usage and query limits. An easy SQL query for GitHub to run internally is opaque and confusing for a third-party to develop - GitHub knows what things are easy to hard to query by design but outside of GitHub you just make the API calls and hope it scales well to larger projects, or find out the hard way when it fails.

sshine 3y ago

Yes, I started using it 6 months ago. We only have one team of 5 developers. Compared to Jira, it is not gut-wrenching terrible. My employer's project manager left the month after I started, so I took over his overview. I switched from Jira to GitHub Projects because I value my life as a developer. It's not as feature rich, but that's a feature. The integration with PRs and commits is top class. Projects can span multiple repositories, which is neat. We are mostly mono-repo, but we do have one active project using a different set of technologies. I have one long-lived project for getting our main product ready, containing several milestones, some of which have deadlines yet to be determined, some deadlines stretching 6 months into delivery. I use the kanban board for keeping track of what my colleagues are working on, and for measuring how much is left. I don't use the roadmap feature, because my employer has a time estimation problem right now, but it looks very neat. I use a "tracking issue" label that just lists other issues. For example, a tracking issue for a particular customer. I really like how doing "- #123" in an issue or PR expands that into the title and an icon indicating if it was open or closed. This is just standard GitHub functionality, but it's super. Sometimes tracking issues are created from doing a customer integration test, where a failed test is converted into a task. But until they're a separate issue, they're just a bullet point in the tracking issue. I'd like to be able to export an interactive overview of a subset of issues for customers to look at between meetings (which is possible to make with GitHub's API). But it's not strictly necessary, as screenshares / screendumps of the issue tracker is typically fine.

porridgeraisin 3y ago

github issues as a database. Actions have the backend logic. Search is useful as well.