Divide and rule: diversity of tools to manage a project

Software project management requires different tools for team collaboration and daily routines. Set of tools you use can be a hit or miss. It can either slow you down and make the process harsh or it can seriously improve productivity and collaboration of your team.

While it is very common approach to try to pick single solution for the whole working environment we prefer to work with tools from different vendors. Let me explain why.

So, why not all-in-one solutions?

While total integration of workflow tools will be beneficial at the beginning, you can later find out that some of the tools don’t meet your needs, or are buggy, or just ugly designed.

You will have to live with tools you don’t like, which don’t meet all of your needs. Because removal of one piece of the puzzle will distort the whole picture and will compromise the idea of an all-in-one solution.

For some teams that’s not an issue and they can live with the same all-in-one software for years, even if it is buggy/ugly/outdated. But others will like to move on to new tools with new features, better performance for less money.

That’s one of the reasons I like to pick tools from different vendors — you can always switch to the one you need, not the one some company thinks you need.

Another reason is that tools created by small teams will gain the full attention of their developers, and no doubt it will lead to better quality compared to competitors from bigger companies. Of course it often will have less features but more often it can have unique cool features.

And don’t worry about integrations. Everything integrates with everything now days. Asana easily plays with Github, Github seamlessly connects to Jira, and Dropbox Paper allows to embed Marvel mockups into docs (and tons of other stuff). Just make sure integrations list is good enough for you before deciding on the next tool to use.

Now let me describe few basic tools we use in our team for project management.

Tasks management

Almost every software project you know is hosted on Github. But not everyone know that Github with its Organisations, Issues and Projects is also a decent task management tool. And not just for open source projects! In the past we tried different tools like Trello or Asana and eventually picked Github as the primary and only one task management solution. The reason is that level of integration of any 3rd party tool with code hosted on Github is ridiculously low compared to Github tools.

This is one of the rare case when platform tools are so deeply integrated that you just have no other choices. With Github you have everything you need for managing software projects:

• Organisations — for managing developers teams and permissions
• Issues — for managing your tasks in clean, simple and comprehensive way. It provides everything you need for organising your work and collaboration of your team. For example tasks labels, groups (milestones), filters, comments, well known Pull Requests with reviews.
• Projects — for all sorts of kanban. They also have automation features which will seriously facilitate keeping tasks statuses up to date without the need of human participation.

While task management tools are really shiny, I wouldn’t recommend hosting your docs on Github Wiki. It seams to be primitive compared to competitors, and basically you don’t need to integrate your specs too deep with your code.

Documents

You will always need some place for storing relatively persistent information regarding your project. It’s really bad idea to keep specs or important details regarding a project in emails or in chat client, and then expect anyone to find it after one month (or even one week).

We use Dropbox Paper for all sorts of docs. Comparing to some other products it’s not that popular but it looks fantastically clean and simple and has all the features you need:

• Collaborative editing with permissions management
• comments on selected text
• markdown support
• very simple tasks management features
• folders of documents
• tons of integrations.

These are just key features of the Paper, there are a lot of other small details which make this software really great. But what makes it standing out of competitors is it’s design. Dropbox Paper will not distract you from your work, but will motivate you to work with it.

Files

We have been using Dropbox for a long time. It has evolved from just a helpful tool to the solid platform which seriously improves a team experience. It allows one to manage permissions of collaborative access to files, share files seamlessly and put comments to files using web interface. And just like Dropbox Paper it has simple UI which isn’t overloaded with anything you don’t need.

Though most features of Dropbox are common to file storage solutions, there is one which had been staying unique for some time. It is called Smart Sync and it allows one to download files to local computer only when they need to be viewed. You can walk through your Dropbox folders on your computer, observe list of files but none of them will be downloaded until you open it. Google with its Drive Stream caught Dropbox up later, but nevertheless Dropbox was the first one to offer such a great feature.

As I mentioned in the beginning, Dropbox has become popular long time ago. Which means you will find its integrations almost everywhere:

• files upload — pick a file from your Dropbox folder
• download — files will be downloaded directly into your folder, through Dropbox API
• media files embedding in numerous text editors.

OttoFeller is the software development company specialising in front end of complex web applications and in promising cutting edge technologies.