It seems to be a mix of a number of tools that are used, e.g. jira, github, trello, google docs, slack, etc. And which ones are preferred depends on if you're a product manager, designer, or developer.

TL;DR: I'm curious to know what works for people here. Which tools do you use for projects, where are the pain points, and what are features that are missing?

For the D developers especially, what are the pain points of managing a project such as dlang? What are the tools that are useful? Why are they useful? Which tools have failed you? What's missing?

I ask because a few colleagues and I have been trying to figure out why it's always so hard to make everyone in a software project happy with how collaboration takes places, and keep everyone on the same page. There always seems to be a problem. E.g. Jira is too complicated, everything goes stale in confluence, trello doesn't integrate with github intuitively, github projects is lacking, no one contributes to the google doc, why can't we all just use github issues, slack is too synchronous, what you've been working on that too?, who's working on feature X?, why did we implement feature Y?, etc.

We kinda have a hypothesis that a document-centric (i.e. google doc like place where designs, features, specs are laid out), externally integrated tool is the way to go - given that, issues/tasks can be created from within the document and the integrations can handle broadcasting those issues to whatever tools developers/designers are using, while also updating the related documents with events that occur.

This would mean that you could have a google doc, write up stuff, comment in it, and then create tasks out of the text in the doc, which would be synced with say github (i.e. an issue would be created in github), and then the resulting commit that fixes that issue would bubble back up to the doc and be visually resolved. This would keep the document "alive" and would not force people to use tools they didn't want to (given the tool they want to use provides an API that can be integrated with).

I'd be interested to hear thoughts around this subject.

Cheers,
- Ali

On Thursday, 2 May 2019 at 21:13:05 UTC, aliak wrote:
> It seems to be a mix of a number of tools that are used, e.g. jira, github, trello, google docs, slack, etc. And which ones are preferred depends on if you're a product manager, designer, or developer.
>
> TL;DR: I'm curious to know what works for people here. Which tools do you use for projects, where are the pain points, and what are features that are missing?
>
> We kinda have a hypothesis that a document-centric (i.e. google doc like place where designs, features, specs are laid out), externally integrated tool is the way to go - given that, issues/tasks can be created from within the document and the integrations can handle broadcasting those issues to whatever tools developers/designers are using, while also updating the related documents with events that occur.

I believe that you just need to be blessed to have that one guy who gets people together, who keeps stuff up-to-date, who forces people to sync their work, who motivates people to also do that boring work that they rather skip but will be so happy about 6 months down the road... essentially a guy who keeps you from being lazy and pulls you out of your comfort zone.

If you have that guy, you can use any tool you want.

On 5/2/19 5:13 PM, aliak wrote:
> It seems to be a mix of a number of tools that are used, e.g. jira, github, trello, google docs, slack, etc. And which ones are preferred depends on if you're a product manager, designer, or developer.

I've (reluctantly) become fairly dependent on Github. The tools it provides are indispensable even though whole approach to its implementation is completely insane.

The rest of those tools you mention (all super-ultra web-2.0-ish, at last the ones I've heard of), I'm proud to say I've never had the mispleasure of going anywhere near. (I still won't even touch TwitFace(tm).)