I'm looking into various tools for software development project management (Trello, Jira, Asana, etc.) and I'd like to get feedback on tools that you use and what you do or don't like about those tools.
For a software team of a handful of people or more, nothing holds a candle to JIRA. It's a little intimidating to new users, and the setup time is ridiculous. I have one or two nitpicks about things like the unavailability of conditional logic in some aspects of workflows. But if you're responsible for _managing_ the project, nothing beats being able to use your issue database as an actual database. And JIRA can be configured to reflect anything from the loosest zero-overhead startuppy kanban process (basically a UI almost exactly like Trello) to the most rigid and calcified enterprise process - and anything in between.
For small backlogs and non-technical users, Trello can be effective, but mature software projects tend to accumulate thousands of open bugs and feature requests and things-we'd-like-to-do-better-someday-if-we-ever-have-the-time. Trello's cards aren't skimmable, and you can't sort and filter them by multiple dimensions the way I'd prefer. There's no way to group a bunch of cards into something like an epic. And I still haven't figured out in Trello how to assign a card to one person but have other people subscribe to updates on it. It's ok to be the engineer assigned work via Trello, but it's awful to be the project manager trying to manage a backlog in Trello.
Asana is good for personal to-dos and tiny projects, but it's awful if you need to track the status of an issue through multiple steps of a process. It's a nearly perfect platform for GTD lists. But GTD is not a system for communication among multiple people.
Finally, both Asana and Trello are missing unique, persistent, human-readable issue IDs that can be used to quickly refer to and pull up a specific item out of hundreds or thousands that may have similar keywords. It seems like a small thing, but is a huge deal dealer for me because it breaks communication.
As for Basecamp, which someone else mentioned, I find it effective for communicating about a project with clients, but not for tracking the internal status of a large number of tasks for some of the same reasons outlined above.
I've tried Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and JIRA as well. JIRA's issue IDs are worth it alone for me. I use them to name git branches. The one thing I miss about Asana was infinitely nestable tasks. Trello was a mess and Basecamp was too restrictive on how many open projects you can have.
Not having task ID's on Asana is really annoying. Especially when you need to ask someone about something but the task name is really long/some really niche specific thing.
We initially used PivotalTracker for managing our development teams, and Trello to get a high level overview of project status as well as for planning.
We're currently working on building our own version of PivotalTracker using a fork of CM42 (https://github.com/Codeminer42/cm42-central) for internal use.
Tough choice because there's a clash of personal preference, and role preference. JIRA is great for dev management, but it's hostile to business/design folk, and even developers tend to prefer lightweight github issues. Was tired of fighting, so went and built a sync tool to combine/switch Trello, JIRA, Asana, GitHub, etc seamlessly. Maybe it can help https://unito.io
Our team uses LiquidPlanner but it requires a lot of training and workshops to start using it right. Devs within the team struggle with the initial learning curve so we integrated Bugzilla and it works really well. The biggest feature we rely on from LP is predictive estimate ranges. For teams relying on the software releases of other teams the managers of each can see different uncertainty estimates and plan accordingly.
Started using Clubhouse a few months ago, and finding it way better for software projects than anything else we tried. We're a team of 10 people, and it works well for the developers and product manager.
In the past we've used Pivotal Tracker and Trello, but neither was a good fit. Also looked at Jira, but the interface had too much overhead (slow and required too many clicks to do anything).
Basecamp is the least terrible I've used, because it has simple task/todo lists with conversations (comments) on each item, due dates, assignments etc.
Unfortunately I find their ux/ui painful to use, everything is a custom widget, and seems painfully slow from here (s.e. Asia on not fantastic adsl)
Visual Studio Team Services is a pretty all-in-one solution. The only thing I'd like it to have a vastly simpler non-technical view. Something like Trello, as a front-end. They try to do this but imo it's not very effective.
VSTS and Jira and basically equivalent in my experience.
One tool that hasn't been mantioned yet is waffle.io, it uses simple Kanban system and comes handy in terms of connecting issues to GitHub. It has the tag system similar to JIRA's one and provides Scrum tools like backlog section and burndown chart.
I used to use Pivotal Tracker, was forced into using Jira. Honestly Jira ecosystem is not that bad as long as you don't have people passionate about process customizing everything.
For small backlogs and non-technical users, Trello can be effective, but mature software projects tend to accumulate thousands of open bugs and feature requests and things-we'd-like-to-do-better-someday-if-we-ever-have-the-time. Trello's cards aren't skimmable, and you can't sort and filter them by multiple dimensions the way I'd prefer. There's no way to group a bunch of cards into something like an epic. And I still haven't figured out in Trello how to assign a card to one person but have other people subscribe to updates on it. It's ok to be the engineer assigned work via Trello, but it's awful to be the project manager trying to manage a backlog in Trello.
Asana is good for personal to-dos and tiny projects, but it's awful if you need to track the status of an issue through multiple steps of a process. It's a nearly perfect platform for GTD lists. But GTD is not a system for communication among multiple people.
Finally, both Asana and Trello are missing unique, persistent, human-readable issue IDs that can be used to quickly refer to and pull up a specific item out of hundreds or thousands that may have similar keywords. It seems like a small thing, but is a huge deal dealer for me because it breaks communication.
As for Basecamp, which someone else mentioned, I find it effective for communicating about a project with clients, but not for tracking the internal status of a large number of tasks for some of the same reasons outlined above.