GH Issues and Trello instead of Youtrack

[hunterboerner]

@sk89q

We are in the process of applying for an open source license of YouTrack and setting it up. YouTrack is an issue tracker which we will use to track what’s on the project and community’s todo list.
Until we setup the issue tracker, we will not be very well able to organize the development effort, so it’s currently a top priority issue.
For pull requests, we plan to have them managed on the issue tracker using the process outlined below (this process also happens to be a work in progress).
The process is expected to start with someone logging a new issue requesting a feature (or bug fix). Two or more handlers from the team will be responsible for reviewing the request, discussing it with the team, and responding to the submitter.
If the team believes that the feature is warranted, then the issue will be marked as “accepted.” If the submitter (or someone else) is willing to implement the feature, then the issue will move to “in progress” to notify everyone that someone is working on it.
Once a pull request is ready, it will be reviewed by a committee. Unless the addition involves a lot of breaking changes, there will be a time limit (to be announced) for a decision to be made by (so pull requests don’t sit for eternity).
If the pull request is not up to the necessary standards, the pull request will be rejected, but the corresponding issue will be kept open, though its state will be brought back to “accepted,” declaring that no one is currently working on the issue but it is a feature that the team feels fits with the goals of Sponge.

This process is overly complex. I also think GitHub issues and Trello would be far more convinent for an open source project (as the UI is much easier to use and is familiar to more people).

[teozkr]

Also see Waffle which is a Trello clone that is backed by GH Issues.

[Grinch]

Waffle.io as suggested above looks nice. I really don’t like how YouTrack looks, it is visually unappealing.

[kitskub]

We did consider several issue tracking systems, including Waffle, Trello, Github issues, etc.

However, we decided that YouTrack offers the features that we need.

[jacklin213]

Just wondering, was JIRA ever considered?

[hunterboerner]

Jira is overly complex and a PITA to work with.

[hunterboerner]

The main problem with using a kanban (trello like stuff) backed by GitHub is that it’s not meant to be used that way. The idea of a kanban is to track who’s doing what, and where they are. It’s meant to be very visual, where far left hasn’t been worked on, and far right is done, with progression in the middle. Issues trackers however, should be used to manage information about issues. When you combine the two you end up with a huge mess of 700 tickets on a kanban board.

tl;dr Use trello/kanban for tracking short term progress; use issue tracker for tracking the actual issues, not the progress of fixing them.

Of course things like, “working on it soon”, are fine in your issue tracker, how else do you tell people you’re going to fix it?

[teozkr]

I played around a bit with Waffle, and it looks like you can configure it to require a special label in order to show up on the Waffle board in order to reduce clutter.

[sk89q]

With YouTrack, the tickets don’t appear on the board automatically. We have to put it there.

[IDragonfire]

Youtrack is online: http://issues.spongepowered.org/