HN user
Thank you for the kind words - and the honest feedback! This are similar to thoughts we have heard for other users and we are working on better ways to give you more control over the UI in the near future
You can really improve the GitHub issue board experience with tools like ZenHub [1] - which is further ahead than the GitLab project management experience. This extra functionality is really needed in order to get the PM's buy in to switch from Jira.
The GitHub ecosystem will be the biggest hurdle for GitLab to overcome. (Disclosure - I work at ZenHub)
Using ZenHub also provides additional features like time estimation, burndown charts and Epics (for issue hierarchy) - we find that for larger teams, these are must-have features to work inside GitHub.
At ZenHub, we have already starting working on some integrations with this functionality which you can read more about here - https://www.zenhub.com/blog/dispatches-from-github-universe/
Our focus is going to remain on how to integrate a full-featured project management suite within the GitHub eco-system. The GitHub projects release will make a great foundation, and ZenHub will be there to provide the more advanced features like issue hierarchy (epics), time estimation and reporting. Lots of exciting releases coming soon for ZenHub users :)
Right now we are focused on getting the experience right in GitHub, but I agree that an ultimate solution must allow teams the choice of which source control system they want to use.
We get lots of feature requests for GitLab and BitBucket support so those are two likely points to integrate with next.
As a previous Jira user I have come across all the problems in this article. But the biggest problem with Jira, and all similar applications is that developers just don't want to use it - as a PM you either end up having to force a tool on the team or try and work from inaccurate data (which involves lots of asking for status updates rather than getting them async from the tool)
This is actually why we created ZenHub[1] to take this work flow to the makers rather than the managers.
We find this provides higher quality data and improves productivity by reducing context switching. Im interested to hear everyones thoughts about this integrated approach vs siloed tools like Jira. In my biased opinion the days of having a separate tool for this are numbered (see also the GitLab issue board release)
Congrats to the Gitlab team for pushing this out the door so quickly!
Back when we built one of ZenHub’s [1] first features — task boards inside GitHub — we believed strongly that development teams needed a single source of truth in order to move faster and communicate better. That belief has underscored everything we’ve built since. It’s awesome to see further validation for this philosophy here with Gitlab!
Awesome move by GitHub. ZenHub[1] will be phasing out our +1 button now that it's no longer needed – feels good to focus. We're excited to use this reactions data as part of our reporting suite, please keep the improvements coming!
We created ZenHub - https://www.zenhub.io/ - specifically to solve these problems.
The addition of a task board in the GitHub interface allows you to communicate both the priority and progress of GitHub issues.
While adding a +1 button to comments allows feedback without clutter.
Best of all, it is free for Open Source :)
You can read more on why we created ZenHub here - https://medium.com/axiom-zen/introducing-zenhub-2-0-c352a12c... and get in touch with us via our public support repo here - https://github.com/zenhubio/support
I hope we can help improve your GitHub experience!
Check out ZenHub -
It adds these features to improve the GitHub Issue tracker directly into GitHub.com, allowing you to:
- Display issues on a task board by priority and progress - Attach any file type to an issue - Add estimates and view burndown charts / metrics attached to them - +1 issues to avoid excess comments - Improved search functionality - Link repos together to view issues that span multiple projects
Without having to context switch out to a separate issue tracker or UI
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Disclosure - I work at ZenHub, and use it with GitHub all day :D