Workflow management for small group of software developers

October 25, 2018 9:24 AM

My four-person distributed team of software developers is trying to find a good setup for issue tracking, workflow management, and communication.

We are four software developers, all working from home in different locations. Our communication and workflow setup requires a fair amount of overhead and we're trying to find a better solution. Here is our current setup:

• For text and voice chat we use (and are happy with) Slack.
• For issue tracking we use (and are not happy with) Redmine.
• For workflow management we use (and are happy with) Leankit, which is basically a kanban board-style progress tracker.
• For version control we use git, not github or gitlab or anything like that. At our scale, this is fine.

This is our workflow (I've tried to pare it down to the basic details):

• Bugs, issues, feature requests, etc are all stored in Redmine.
• Progress on a ticket is tracked in Leankit. This is helpful because we can see the state of all work in progress at a glance.
• Certain stages (eg branch ready for review or ready to be merged) require the team to be notified in Slack. I recently set up Zapier (an automation service) to have status changes in Leankit trigger automatic notifications in Slack.

Certain information is duplicated between Leankit and Redmine. For instance, the owner and reviewer of a ticket are marked in both systems. When a ticket is done, we have to mark it as done in both systems. The real problem seems to be this duplication of information. Folks will often forget to update information in one place (usually Redmine).

We like Slack, and Leankit is pretty good. Redmine seems to be the main problem. What we're looking for is either (a) a system that does issue tracking and kanban, or (b) an issue tracker that integrates with Leankit. Bonus points for direct integration with Slack, and extra bonus points for the ability to import all our current data from Redmine. We'd like to keep costs as low as possible, but we're not averse to paying for stuff that works. Hope me, MetaFilter!

posted by number9dream to Technology (9 answers total)

You shouldn't need to have bugs/features and actual progress on those issues tracked separately - that's a pain. Have you checked out Pivotal Tracker? It sounds like it should do what you need to do, and is pretty simple/straightforward (there are a lot of project management systems out there that might be overkill for what you're trying to do at this point).

It looks like Tracker should integrate with Redmine. There's a Slack integration as well.
posted by warble at 9:50 AM on October 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

We have a similar team size. We use Github for source control, issue tracking, and board-style organization (they recently added this under the "Projects" tab). There are github Slack integrations, which we use a little, and of course plenty of ecosystem support for Github in general. It's working for us as well as anything has, which is to say I'm sure we'll try something else before too long.
posted by john hadron collider at 10:07 AM on October 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

JIRA is pretty good for issue tracking and kanban. It seems to have good Slack integration (though my company doesn't use it), it definitely has good GitHub integration (if you end up there as you grow), and LeanKit seems to promote their integration: https://leankit.com/blog/2018/01/kanban-with-jira/
posted by lostburner at 10:16 AM on October 25, 2018 [3 favorites]

YouTrack is like Trello and JIRA had a baby that I actually like to use. There are kanban boards by project and the system is pretty dang robust.
posted by Medieval Maven at 10:22 AM on October 25, 2018

Trello and jira. I hate leankit so much.
posted by tilde at 10:23 AM on October 25, 2018

As much as I hate Jira sometimes, it would basically do what you're using two systems for now, consolidating issue-tracking from Redmine and workflow management from LeanKit. Eventually, as you scale, GitHub or GitLab would probably be good to add, and it can integrate with Jira (showing links to pull requests on Jira stories, for instance) and Slack (so you could have an automated code-review queue managed by Slack bot).
posted by limeonaire at 10:40 AM on October 25, 2018

Github/Gitlab is where you should go. I'm not sure why "scale" comes into the picture. I host my tiny personal projects on Github, and so does my work (everyone's favorite fruit company!). Although for work we pay truck loads of money to host the software ourselves.

Private repos on Github are very cheap ($9/month a person for 4 people), and Gitlab will give them to you for free.
posted by sideshow at 10:55 AM on October 25, 2018

I've used a handful of tracking systems and Jira, which we're using now, has been the least irritating. We have two separate work areas: a service desk and a board that's used for either scrum or kanban-style tracking, depending on the project.
posted by mikeh at 1:27 PM on October 25, 2018

Just to throw out another option, for repair / issue tracking at my engineering group we use RequestTracker. Basic ticketing system that you can dig into and tweak if you want but it does a good enough job for us.
posted by msbutah at 7:12 PM on October 25, 2018