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by brenden2 2336 days ago
Fewer features sounds great. I personally loath Jira, and avoid using it whenever possible, but your clone looks really nice. You can improve 100x on Jira just by making it faster, simpler, and easier to use.

One suggestion: it looks too similar to Jira, you might want to change the design a bit so that Atlassian doesn't try to sue you or something.

3 comments

JIRA is great but only in an enterprise where there's a team to manage it, I've moved on from it and I miss the flexibility that it offers - but that flexibility comes with extreme complexity. Most small to medium sized businesses don't need it and can make do with something with less features.
As a counterpoint to this, jira is _not_ great in any environment precisely because it is so flexible and requires a team to manage it.

If a job needs to exist purely to maintain a third party tool that you pay for, you probably should find a new tool or make the tool yourself so that the employees work value is retained. It's the equivalent of doing a complete kitchen renovation on an apartment that you rent.

But jira isn't the problem that's being solved - a person hired full time would be a project manager, who in the absence of jira, would solve the project management problem with different tools.

Jira is not perfect. But the atlassian suite as a whole, with integration between CI, PM and version control, is quite powerful and more than adequate in many cases.

That said, boy have I seen it used terribly. It's double edged for sure.

> JIRA is great but only in an enterprise where there's a team to manage it

If you have a team to manage it then you may as well use that team to write your own, then you truly get the flexibility with none of the performance downside and having to program in crappy languages with crappy tools. Plus it can grow and evolve with your organization, for a start up a couple of cgi scripts on a rasberry pi are enough, for a large enterprise those cgi scripts are probably still 10 times faster than JIRA.

JIRA has become the SAP of bug of issue trackers and no one can use it well out of the box.

I agree.

What we need is Jira and Trello to have a baby

That thought is going to haunt my dreams tonight, thanks! If I wake up screaming in horror, I’m blaming you.
Everyone says fewer features sounds great until the missing features includes the one they reeeeaaaallly need.
What do you prefer to Jira? At a former workplace we used Gitlab, which was a pleasant suite to use. These days we use Atlassian and often find myself incredibly frustrated by their products
We've been using https://subtask.co -- it has 3 pretty awesome features which I'm baffled why Trello doesn't have:

- You can break down tasks into subtasks and those subtasks into subtasks themselves, etc

- You can dynamically group task columns by who's working on them, what is their status, what is their goal, etc

- You can arrange what's to be done on an effort-value grid, which helps immensely when choosing what to take on next

Looks good but I can't find anything on their pricing..?
Hi - (creator of subtask.co here) - Noticed a few signups coming from hn and thought I'd pop in. We're still in an early beta phase now and so pricing is still TBD - we're happy to have any input on what would work for folks though.
I did a six month contract at Apple Retail Software Engineering back in 2013, and was introduced to Pivotal Tracker. I always thought that tool worked pretty well.

I've heard good things about Rally.

Trello was good and simple, back when it wasn't owned by Atlassian (the makers of JIRA).

So far as I know, that's about it.

Request Tracker (RT) is awesome.

Does it look good? Nah, not particularly.

I have fond memories of RT, but it seems like it has largely been forgotten. It was very simple. One of the best things about it was that it could largely be used via email. The web interface was very fast and efficient compared to JIRA. One major downside: Its search feature was not great, so I would usually search in my mail client.
Check out Hive. Really nice for medium sized projects.