As easy to use as Trello for small teams, but scales up as you grow (although we probably cap out at 100-ish devs right now, not quite to Jira's level yet.)
Looks awesome - but please tell me you will have download-and-install option? Hosting solution is not acceptable to us and this could differentiate you from hundreds of others in this area.
We deploy multiple times a day right now. Clubhouse is built with the option of a hosted version in mind, but we'd have to get to the point where we felt that things were stable and complete enough to say "ok, let's call this 1.0 and ship it."
That sounds really interesting, we're still looking for the perfect fit in this area. Github issues are inconvenient for having a nice overview, Trello is good but not perfect for the multiple small projects of our company, and JIRA is definitely overkill.
I just requested a beta invite. Glad to see other businesses built on Clojure codebases!
I wrote something on top -- it imports github and google code issues and google tasks into emacs org-mode. Then I work on it from there. More than good enough for single users who've got to track a lot of crap.
I can confirm there is an opening for something new. We use FogBugz (and pay quite a bit for the hosted version), because GitHub issues are too simplistic, and we hate JIRA.
However, FogBugz has its share of problems, and I'd gladly move to something else, if only there was something better. Must-haves that many companies miss are:
* flawless E-mail integration,
* task numbers,
* API that lets me attach code commit links (linking to GitHub) for reviews.
As to why not FogBugz — a number of reasons and annoyances. It's slow, expensive, too complex in many places, we've encountered a number of bugs over the years, and Fog Creek strongly resists changing FogBugz. Even relatively minor changes (we wanted FogBugz to detect cases based on "#1234" case numbers not a "Case #1234" string, because if you don't write in English, writing "case #1234" is unnatural) are refused.
So basically, you want to (1) pay less for (2) a faster product that is (3) simpler and (4) less buggy, but also (5) implements most features that customers ask for.
I've been working on my own at https://getneutrino.com I built it for myself for the exact same reasons and then decided to open it up. It doesn't have e-mail integration or git/GitHub yet but both are being worked on and will probably be rolled out this weekend or next. I'll admit it's still a bit raw as it's still transitioning from "little project I built for myself" to a product.
I really enjoy Breeze[0] at work. It's similar in concept to Trello, but aimed far more at project management and development. They just released a Gantt chart app that integrates with it, which is making some managers here really happy, heh.
Oops! Thanks. I've also written a command-line interface for Breeze, which coupled with the BitBucket integration means I rarely even open the interface itself!
I feel like everyone talking about JIRA aren't talking about the same thing. I stated strongly in a job interview that I currently used JIRA and knew it well. But was surprised that the new job didn't set theirs up in the same was as the job before.
It all depends on how you set it up, because it can be setup in myriad of ways. My first job the PM set up all sorts of convenience links to see different issues in different ways (sprint, status, owner, priority).
Now at my new job they just tell us over skype what query they typed in. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a lot more work than if it was setup differently.
Furthermore, the number of states a issue can be in can be different too. And it can be confounding to have too many states which mean nothing, or too few that don't mean enough.
I am currently trying out Kanboard [1]. Not as slick as Trello but self-hosted and easy to install. Wonder whether anybody else has tried it and what they think about it.
I'm not positive they use it for issue tracking but they may. In my case, I was dealing with a single repo with 1000 or so contributors, and they were community people so it was very hard to get them to file quality structured bug reports, and the system didn't really allow for asking questions.
It lacks strong organizational features, categorization, issue templates, search, and ability to save filters.
I've seen a lot of projects use it for pull requests and then disable the issue tracker, which is good and bad - you get a better tracker, you miss probably half of the bug reports.
They can be applied by the owner, but I guess I was thinking more of the ability to have a required 'component' field or a required field for the type of the ticket.
While Jira can be clunky I don't mind using it since it's pretty much totally accessible to me as a blind developer. I can't say the same for a lot of other products my company used to use. Github is pretty good from an accessibility standpoint as well. One thing I can't figure out how to do in Github is see all forks of a repository. Is this possible to do?
To clarify/expand on what another person said, it is possible to see the forks of a repository by appending "/network" to the repository URL. (For example, https://github.com/golang/go/network.) Curious to know how well screen-readers can parse that, if at all :)
(BTW, repos with very large numbers of forks, like Rails, aren't able to render a network graph at all.)
Comboboxes are accessible by default with all modern screen readers on the web. Dropdowns are a bit tricky, I hit enter on the link and if when I arrow down I don't see new options I skip to the bottom of the page since that's where a lot of the options appear. For auto complete I type as much of the value as I know ina nd hit tab. I then look to see if the correct value was filled in and if it wasn't look at the options that appear and hit enter on the proper one.
The point and click aspect is potentially significantly complicated by the fact that the parent indicated that he's blind. I've never tried GH with a screen reader, so I'm not sure what the usability is like in that case.
Ah, I only read the part I quoted, so I didn't realize that. No wonder I got downvoted.
I know GitHub has at least some considerations because if you press tab, it shows a hidden "Skip to content" button (which I thought was a bug, but learned it's for screen readers). But I can tell the Network tab doesn't look as reader friendly as the Members tab because it uses some non-standard canvas element or so.
Sorry, I didn't realize you were a blind developer, so my "I can't believe you didn't see it, just click the number" comment was unfitting. I'm glad that the Members tab is helpful.
okay, i'll bite. My employer recently made the switch from Hipchat to Slack, and I can't really tell any difference in functionality. The only thing slack has is that it's pretty/shiny, which doesn't really make any difference to me personally. If anything, I miss being able to arrange the channels like I could in Hipchat.
My employer also recently switched from Hipchat to Slack, and I'd say Slack is vastly superior.
Most important for me are the notifications. Slack lets you set per-channel notification settings. With Hipchat I'd either miss messages I wanted to see or have to get constant notifications. "More granular notifications" was either the #1 or #2 highest-voted issue in their feature requests for over three years, and they're only now getting to the point where they have a beta version of the feature.
Also, if I received messages while I had Hipchat closed and opened it back up later, there'd be no indication I had received a message[0]. With Slack, I can always quickly catch up on messages I missed in channels I care about.
It's possible to edit posts in Slack, which isn't as essential, but still very useful.
Hipchat would initiate laggy emoticon autocomplete after I typed an opening paren, which I found very obnoxious. My goal was almost always to add a parenthetical statement, not an emoticon. There didn't seem to be a way to turn the autocomplete off.
Hipchat uad miscellaneous minor bugs that I've never experienced with Slack.
The only real thing I see in Hipchat's favor is the integrated video/voice chat, but there are plenty of other ways for me to do that when I need to. Plus, hopefully Slack will have Screenhero integrated soon.
[0] If I was @tagged I'd receive an email, but the app itself still wouldn't give me any indication of unread messages.
Since I used the keyboard for most of my navigation in HipChat I find Slack incredibly annoying. With HipChat I could rearrange channels and have my most often used 3 at the top and switch between with a couple keystrokes. With Slack it's so much more cumbersome.
Slack feels much slower.
In Hipchat you can edit your last message with Vim style substitution strings. i.e.: s/were/where/
The Channel/Group distinction in Slack is useless and annoying since you have to adjust team broadcasts to the channel you're in (@group or @channel).
Slack doesn't have @here (so offline people don't get pinged). i.e.: "@here Anyone up for lunch?"
I'd be much less annoyed with Slack if it let me rearrange Channels. But still. It seems like it trades obvious functionality for stupid meme integrations. Gets under my skin.
Personally, being in a ~20 person company, I really don't really care about per-channel notifications. YAGNI. If I don't want to be notified, I just don't join that channel. Otherwise if someone pings me with @group, I want to see it. And if it's important enough, don't depend on the chat app sending my phone a notification. Text or Call me. We're a Mac shop so that's just a keystroke away with the Messages app or FaceTime Audio if you're at your desk anyways. Don't tell me sites are down and the building is on fire through Slack.
I know about the s// substitution, but it just isn't very useful. Sometimes I'll have sent a couple messages before I notice a typo. Also, it's very limited in the type of edits it can make. Last time I tried to use it I realized I had typed "it's" instead of "its", but it turns out I had already using "it's" earlier in the message. I ended up making both "it's" wrong instead of correcting the one I wanted to.
Slack added @here a few weeks ago. Otherwise that would have been on my list of Hipchat pluses.
Being able to rearrange channels would be nice, but it isn't a big deal to me. I mostly use the "Jump to next unread message" hotkey in Slack to switch between channels.
okay, you're right. The per channel notifications and showing notifications on logging back in are both things I really wanted in Hipchat at the time. I guess now that I'm so used to having them in Slack, I completely forgot about not having them!!
HipChat is playing catchup constantly with Slack (except the @here feature; Slack was behind the ball on that one). Slack's channel integrations are incredibly smooth. Message delivery is so much more reliable on Slack mobile than HipChat's app ever was (perhaps this was iOS specific?). Message management (stars, pinning, history links I can take from Slack and throw into Github issues, commits, or other SaaS team tools). The management of multiple teams in one interface on both mobile and mac desktop app (Slack handles this extremely well).
Github issues are enough for me to stick with GH. It Just Works. So you don't have to provide me with Github, Slack, etc as an employer. But it'll effect my decision to work there. I've interviewed people at my previous job, and they have flat out decided not to join when they were told we weren't using Github and had no plans to move to it.
When you're spending 8 hours (or more!) a day in tools, you expect them to be the best/easiest/most productive to use.
Slack:
1. I agree on the part about multiple teams, but since I only use it for work, it hasn't really been much of an issue.
2. I never really had any issues w message delivery, I'm on Android though, and it seems like you're on iOS.
3. I also don't remember having any issues w integrations, do you have a specific example of something that it wasn't able to do?
4. What exactly do you mean by "stars, pinning, history links I can take from Slack and throw into Github issues, commits, or other SaaS team tools"? Do you mean a bot or something that performed those actions on certain keystrokes?
Github:
1. I don't really care for Github issues to be honest. We don't use them at work, and for a lot of the open source repos, it's just a bunch of +1s with the occasional constructive comment sprinkled in somewhere.
2. Also, the comments on the PR don't have a way to mark someone's suggestion as accepted, and the comments aren't threaded either.
3. My biggest concern is that anyone can accidentally force push, though I don't know if Gitlab has a way of preventing that either.
My point is that for all the talk about meritocracy in the field of technology, when it comes to success and adoption, marketing and visual aesthetics usually outweigh the actual quality of the product. (also see: mongodb, beats etc)
Regarding (Slack/4)... I believe that toomuchtodo is talking about the following features within Slack:
* Stars: the ability to privately star individual messages (so you can easily find them again)
* Pinning: the ability to publicly highlight specific messages within a channel, much like pinned posts in a forum (effectively channel-wide starring)
* History links: click on the timestamp next to any Slack message and it'll open a canonical URL for that message, allowing you to drop these links to specific messages or points in a conversation into other chats, GH issues or anywhere else you fancy.
i see. History links does seem like a useful feature (I've pasted links to SO answers in slack, so same could be applied to when someone answers a q on slack)
Stars also seems like a useful feature, but I'm so used to pasting useful stuff in a google doc, never even thought of it
GitLab protects the master branch by default and other branches can be configured to be protected. Protected branches don't allow force pushes or deletions from anyone.
Isn't visual quality a part of "quality"? You can't assume that everyone is like you, and it's a very important factor for a lot of people. Slack didn't invent anything new, but their chat somehow crossed the line to being polished enough for "normal people". As for beats, all I'm going to say is that people don't buy Chanel handbags for their carrying capacity.
"Github: 1. I don't really care for Github issues to be honest. We don't use them at work, and for a lot of the open source repos, it's just a bunch of +1s with the occasional constructive comment sprinkled in somewhere."
I have a similar probably-not-well-enough-informed opinion of Github issues. Does anyone have a quick example of a (public) Github project using Github issues in an obviously useful way?
>"But it'll effect my decision to work there. I've interviewed people at my previous job, and they have flat out decided not to join when they were told we weren't using Github and had no plans to move to it."
This is a bit extreme IMO. Tools should be a secondary concern for any developer. If a job is right for a person, such details should not matter.
Those details influence whether the job is right, though. I won't work for a company that uses CVS, for example, because it tells me a lot about the culture of the company. They may have perfectly defensible reasons that make sense to them to use it, but I will, through my own cultural biases and feelings, not be comfortable there.
I restarted slack about three hours ago, and as of right now it's using 552MB [0] across 5 processes. It goes back down if I restart it, and that was enough of a "wontfix" for the slack team when I reported it.
14 channel, I don't know how many there are on the server. Not sure on the number of messages / hour, but it is quite a lot. Leaving slack on overnight has my numbers up to about 800MB. Regardless of how many messages, 800MB for a chat client is nuts.
Yeah, it depends on how big your teams are. There are some perf issues on the on premise solution, but when you're dealing with dozens of teams, each about 5-6 engineers all following scrum or kanban, you really need something like Atlassian.
While this is typically how it's been done in my experience I really don't agree. My take on JIRA is that it can literally do anything project-management wise but everything it does is cumbersome and slow.
I wish there were more alternatives that had SOME similar feature sets (certainly not all of the features; most of the JIRA ones can be interchanged with its other features) and was significantly faster to use.
We just updated Jira at my job, it feels pretty snappy. It has always felt reasonably smooth to me, but I have also only been using it for about 2 months.
The most things in JIRA I need to click probably at least 5 or 6 things to do something. So I didn't necessarily mean it's slow as in clicking on something takes forever to load (though I've seen that happen on self and Atlassian hosted versions of JIRA) but that it just simply takes way too many clicks to do anything in JIRA (except maybe creating an issue since that's always at the very top). In my opinion at least.
I'm using Slack + Gitlab + Pivotal. Overcoming resistance depends on the source. Managers like that they don't need to chase engineers for updates. Engineers like that everything is integrated, so if they 'git push' while referencing the Pivotal story ID, the story will be updated/finished/delivered.
Email in profile, feel free to get in touch if you want more detail.
We are using Jira (only user management) + Confluence + Fisheye with Crucible for code review over a svn repository.
I need to say that Confluence as a internal wiki works very well. And FishEye + Crucible do a really nice to do code reviews. The only weakness that I saw to Fisheye is that when do you do a search of stuff, can't spot the thing that you are searching inside of a source file. Only shows you the source file, enforcing you to relay on your web browser search that don't works well over FishEye UI.
Also, I try to search a open source (and free) replacement of FishEye + Crucible that works over our svn repository. I can't find anything that works on the same way.
Jira seems like overkill for anything but the biggest of projects. Its better then whet went before it, but Trello is refreshingly simple in comparison and well suited to a lot of smaller teams' needs.
Devs are never excited about issue tracking, they just wanna work on things and don't care about what others are doing most of the time. It's project management that benefits from higher-level views that things like Jira provide.
I prefer JIRA. I used Github issues and my current place of work uses Redmine, and neither of them are as nice to use. I like the ability to customize your dashboard to show the exact issues you're interested in, and that you can filter them by basically everything.
I like Jira when I have to use something that beefy, but I'll cape up for Redmine a little bit. I find it to be super easy to hack on when I need to extend it to do what I want and it's a pretty pleasant experience.
Different use cases. Github issues can only take you so far.
I doubt anyone is actually excited about using JIRA. It's usually the solution that just sucks the least and offers features for developers, project managers and higher management alike.
Hello, nice to meet you :) I use jira and I like it. I don't like github issues that much in comparison because it lacks features I love in Jira, like subtasks on an issue. But YMMV of course ;)
I beg to differ: 2-factor authentication[1], you can't change your credentials[2], it's not as easy to integrate with CI tools since most devs just focus in the integration with Github, and probably there are many more ways where Bitbucket is inferior in comparison with Github.
Did you really claim 2-factor authentication as your primary differentiation for choosing source control? Really? Not one of the actual uses of the application?
BTW, GitHub does NOT play well with most CI tools. It's memory management is downright abysmal. As someone who understands the deep workings of source control apps, I hate having to constantly work through issues with devs botching their check ins. I never have this with Bitbucket, and it's pretty clear why. It's because BitBucket doesn't use some mishmash of command line and poorly implemented GUIs.
> Did you really claim 2-factor authentication as your primary differentiation for choosing source control? Really?
As someone who used to have keys to a number of security-critical OSS projects, I would never use password-only authentication to protect write access to my repo.
It's not just the chance of someone sneaking in a change and its getting shipped to users -- although that's also awful -- but it's also the chance of someone sneaking in a change that pwns all of your developers (by running a script as part of the build).
And if you're using a private repository and care about keeping your source code secret, then you really, really, really want 2FA.
Lack of two factor auth is quickly becoming a dealbreaker for me for everything. It doesn't matter _how_ good your webapp/SaaS works - if it's relying on just a password to secure my PII (or worse, my proprietary sourcecode or intellectual property) it's fundamentally broken, bordering on useless.
If a software can log your keypresses, it can probably steal your cookies and log in as you from your machine. Cookies stored by browsers are easily readable by processes running as the same user.
It will help when my unique password get exposed through any of the many likely routes that don't give the attacker complete code execution on the servers - SQLi or using XSS to steal admin tokens for example.
The only benefit I have ever seen with Bitbucket is it is priced per user instead of per repo which is only a benefit if you have smaller teams. The very first project I created for myself in my new role was to move everything out of Bitbucket to GitHub.
Github is so ubiquitous that it too has very good integration with Jira. It's popularity alone means that essentially anything that has version control integration has Github integration.
Here's the thing though: besides the many benefits of Github mentioned in this thread, such as the interface being MUCH nicer and more streamlined, 2 factor auth (which, yes, is VERY important) etc. the nail in the coffin for Bitbucket comes down to one very understandable feature:
After almost 4 YEARS, you STILL can't search through source code on Bitbucket. If there is any confirmation that Atlassian has no idea what developers actually want, that is it right there.
Searching through source code in github is horrible. It only searches through the content and completly ignores filenames which makes it absolutely useless to me.
Of dozens of projects I've contributed to in the past 18 months or so, including open source, freelancing, and at work, all of one has been on anything other than github (Bitbucket) and the other dev and I ended up migrating it to github because we preferred it.
Slack ate HipChat's lunch, too. From the trenches it's hard for me to consider Atlassian the "standard" of modern development focussed organizations.
If they're serious about development, they should have tried Stash. It's for hosting Git inside your company and it is vastly superior to BitBucket when performing pull requests.
Bitbucket is actually superior in many ways because of its tight integration with Atlassian - the real Microsoft Word of the Developer community.
Sourceforge had this kind of play at one point and look at it now.
Maybe they're going to start displaying ads for jobs for developers. Not sure that's worth 2B though...