Jira Alternatives

[zorocke]

Do you use a project management system for your own personal projects? I use Jira at work extensively, everything done is tracked in Jira. I find it actually improves my productivity quite a bit being more organized.

For personal projects, I don't want to shell out the money for Jira. But I would like to try to start using a project management system. Do you have any recommendations? I've looked at a few like mantis and roundup, but none look nearly as pretty as Jira. Maybe this is just aesthetic differences, but from a glance they do not look as powerful.

[PhilipLB]

Maybe Redmine: http://www.redmine.org/

[Klaim]

I've tried (personal install and hosted) Jira, RedMine, Trac, Mantis, and some other tools like that. Here is my point of view:

1. For personal projects, all these are too big, too much to setup, too much to customize, too much time passed on registering data.
2. These tools are best for bug tracking only. They can be used for other things like managing projects, but if your project isn't a library, then you'll find that these tools do poorly compared to alternatives for more specific tasks which are not bug tracking.
3. The best light-weight bug tracking tool I've found is Google Spreadsheet. In particular because it's easily shared but in essence any spreadsheet software works well.
4. The best task management software I've found so far which is both lightweight and scales well is Trello. It's a web implementation of Kaban but in a way that let you organize things visually easily. I use it for all my projects now.

Therefore if you are a lone or small team dev and want simple ways to manage your project:

1. Setup a Trello for managing the tasks and knowing where you're at. It's free and you can backup the data if necessary. The only issue is that it require to have online access (compared to local files or files under source control).
Personally I even use Trello for very small projects. I just list what I have to do and start doing it and then move the tasks around progressively. Changing the card states is incredibly addictive and help you literally seeing your project progress.
2. Setup a SpreadSheet as soon as you have a testable version of your app, so that you keep track of the problems encountered. You can use Trello at first and then switch to a spreadsheet as soon as issues have to be entered by the users or someone who is focused on testing.
3. As soon as you have a big (more than 3) team and you need to customize better your bug tracking, use one of the previously mentionned bug tracking tools. I recommand RedMine or Jira, I have no preference except that RedMine is more easily manipulable as a user.

Hope that it helps.

[Zonder]

http://sprint.ly allows 3 members for free.
http://asana.com this is more high level project management (free again for small team under 15 members)
http://jetbrains.com/youtrack (more like jira, they wrote it to replace jira at jetbrains. Free for 10 users if you install it yourself) This is the one I personally use but it depends on what you need I use teamcity as well for CI and deployment both been from jetbrains they integrate well.

Btw I do highly recommend team city if you want a build server really easy to use.

[zorocke]

I can see how Trello can be addicting. It is this changing of card task states that I like Jira so much actually. Jira has a similar view with cards, I'm not sure if it is default or a plugin though. One of the reasons I don't want to use Trello though is that I would like to really flesh out my project with documentation about the implementation details and such, in the tickets before starting.

I'm going to see about installing youtrack on my amazon server and see how it goes.

[Zonder]

Youtrack has card based views as well (agile boards) you can configure them quite a bit.

[zorocke]

I also did not realize Jira is only a $10 one time fee. I was on the tab for their hosting services

I can totally spin $10 for something I'm already familiar with.

[Klaim]

In this case either Jira or Redmine is fine. I prefer the user interface of RedMine but Jira is good enough.
I just stopped using them for small projects because I would spend too much time on managing them, pushing data in them.
I had a wiki before, using TRAC, but I stopped because the formatting was too specific and it was hard to move the documentation outside the TRAC.
So I switched to having documentations as plain text, either Asciidoc or Markdown, into repositories. It's still possible to edit them online in github or bitbucket.
Of course, at some point that is not as good as a wiki, it depends on your actual usage (will there be tons of people changing the info?)

[Zonder]

I found jira to be memory hungry with a small installation. tbh I not checked youtrack will do that tomorrow it's on a hyperv box that dynamically allocates so I never check

Have to agree with klaim sometime you spend more time managing them. It's one reason I mentioned sprint.ly its very quick to get issues logged and moved about.

[Klaim]

Oh by the way, I should also mention fossil: https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/d ... index.wiki

It's basically a git, jira, forum and other stuffs embedded in a decentralized one-binary tool. It's designed for specific close team case, so not for everyone but still interesting to look at when you want to have a very simple way to setup tools to manage small projects.

[c6burns]

I don't have a tonne of experience with different trackers. I used trac really really extensively before switching to jira and never looking back. I use jira and confluence for my own personal projects as well. I don't find them too heavy, but I can understand that sentiment.

Also, Atlassian will let you issue evaluation licenses to yourself forever. I did that for a long time before just buying the license for myself (shame on me)