This is a post not directly related to meteor or node in particular, but anyone who uses meteor probably knows about management challenges with GitHub Projects. Also, how native GitHub falls apart at managing larger projects (the tracker, not git). But this may change soon (skip below).
So, for a long time GitHub’s Issue System has lacked behind for big open source and serious commercial business projects. I personally love using GitHub on projects, especially with large teams and containerized projects that consist almost of 100% JS: i.e. node + meteor + some static generators. And since you can lay back- and frontend devs together for feature discussions, you can even include non-tech teams. It does however not take long, like on the meteor repo, that noise gets added to make up for a lack of collaboration. “+1” / “
” / “me too” etc. is used for emphasis and prioritization… noise and incredible annoying for a scrum like workflow.
Driven by that, I probably have used every big project management tool out there. I know MDG uses waffle.io. With one team I use zenhub.io, which is currently my favorite (!) because it overlays github and has a low barrier for non-techs. Otherwise JIRA, YouTrack, Team City and of course the good old Trello Board. I personally learned to hate asana (though I heard they did a re-vamp some time ago) and of course internal tools *cough* Google Project *cough*. I have briefly used InVisionApp which is great for agile style feature/product creation and something I definitely look forward to try in the future.
I’m really interested to know what PM tools you use for meteor/node projects? And why?
GitHub pledges to improve issue system
Last week, GitHub finally responded to a long chain of requests to address the lacking functionality of issues on GitHub projects. They already added Issue and Pull Request templates (probably useful for the Meteor Repo) a few days ago. Overall complains are still (re-cite):
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Issues are often filed missing crucial information like reproduction steps or version tested. We’d like issues to gain custom fields, along with a mechanism (such as a mandatory issue template, perhaps powered by a newissue.md in root as a likely-simple solution) for ensuring they are filled out in every issue.
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Issues often accumulate content-less “+1” comments which serve only to spam the maintainers and any others subscribed to the issue. These +1s serve a valuable function in letting maintainers know how widespread an issue is, but their drawbacks are too great. We’d like issues to gain a first-class voting system, and for content-less comments like “+1” or “
” or “me too” to trigger a warning and instructions on how to use the voting mechanism. -
Issues and pull requests are often created without any adherence to the CONTRIBUTING.md contribution guidelines, due to the inconspicuous nature of the “guidelines for contributing” link when creating an issue and the fact that it often contains a lot of information that isn’t relevant to opening issues (such as information about hacking on the project). Maintainers should be able to configure a file in the repo (interpreted as GFM) to be displayed at the top of the new issue / PR page instead of that link. Maintainers can choose to inline content there and / or link to other pages as appropriate.
What do you think? Do you care about Project/Issue Management on GitHub (personally/team)?
I.e. @abhiaiyer do you guys use GitHub Issues at all at workpop?
GitHub is pretty central to everything. So if it really gets better in this area, I’ll purge on “task management tools”