[Tharkun]

A subset of engineers hate Jira. A lot of us love it. It's orders of magnitude better than any other issue tracker out there. It's an absolute powerhouse with its "Jira Query Language" query support. It scales from tiny one man shops (in which case it costs you a tenner), to massive organizations like the Apache Software Foundation.

It's got bells and whistles to spare, including several kitchen sinks, which can make it a bit daunting to configure. But you can configure it to suit your needs, instead of having to conform to some harebrained workflow someone else decided was Good Enough.

What I really hate is that, even after all these years, it doesn't come with a good planning tool. Portfolio is terrible. I've evaluated several Gantt plugins, which were all terrible. A closely related problem is the missing calendar integration. Atlassian has a calendar plugin for Confluence (wiki), which makes zero sense to me. In my world, issue tracking and planning go hand in hand. And you can't plan shit without a calendar. Surely I'm not the only one who feels that way?

Edit: while I'm out praising Jira, have you seen their SDK? You can roll your own Jira plugin in 15 minutes. Bam. Frictionless. Engineers hate it? Those are some weird engineers.

[rangitatanz]

Curious to know if you have seen any project management software with either good calendar or planning support built in? What made it better?

[Tharkun]

I wish I had. Been looking for that holy grail for some time.