Project Management using GitHub Issues and Waffle.io
In this post we are going to discuss how Compufácil is using GitHub Issues and Waffle to manage projects. Elton Minetto, co-owner of Coderockr, which provides consulting services to Compufácil, wrote this post. Compufácil’s team is developing a financial control system for web and mobile platforms.
At Coderockr we have always been supporters of simple tools such as Trello, but for a complex project as Compufácil we chose to work with Jira. Jira is an excellent tool, especially its cloud version, but as time went by we noticed its functionalities were being underused. Since we used GitHub to manage the project’s code, we decided to migrate to GitHub Issues. We had hundreds of tasks on Jira and so we created a script to do this migration seamlessly. It is available in the project’s repository.
One of the team’s favorite functionalities on Jira was the Kanban board, where everyone could easily see each task’s progress and monitor the overall status of projects.
We opted for Waffle to complement GitHub Issues with the Kanban board functionality. Waffle integrates with GitHub and generates an amazing board where we can create tasks and monitor their progress in a visual way.
Among the many advantages we encountered in this process we can cite:
- Easy to use. Task management can now be done through GitHub, preferred by the technical team, or Waffle, loved by product teams. Or even through the command line, using a few scripts the technical team created. In addition, since we have GitHub integrated with Slack, we can also monitor the project directly through the chat. Also, I personally use an iPhone app to observe the activities while I’m out of the office.
- Better connection between tasks and code. We were using Jira’s integration with GitHub to facilitate the matching of tasks with its respective code, but having it all under the same repository made it even easier to manage.
- Lower cost. Since we were only using a few of Jira’s many functionalities, its cost was not really justifiable. On the other hand, Waffle’s free plan is great and sufficient for our needs. We can now reallocate the investment we had on Jira to other tools.
- Statistics. One of Jira’s greatest features is definitely the wide range of graphs and statistics it provides. However, since we had the code on GitHub some information would get lost and not be considered on performance and estimate statistics. Waffle does provide a simple graph showing the number of issues and pull requests done by week, which is useful but not sufficient. For advanced statistics and information on the project we are now using Planrockr. It provides useful monitoring tools and insights on increasing the project’s performance.
The migration from Jira to GitHub + Waffle made life easier, in distinctive ways, for everyone in the team. By using GitHub’s native integration we reduced the number of conventions that developers need to follow to maintain the tasks synchronized with the code. Moreover, with Waffle and Planrockr we manage to keep the entire team informed about the project’s overall progress. This migration also opened our horizons to create a new set of automations that will make the team’s day-to-day activities simpler and more enjoyable.
Jean Carlo Machado, Compufácil’s team leader.
We performed this migration only a few weeks ago, but are already enjoying the benefits due to the advantages mentioned above. Now that we have our tasks and code backed up by a great API such as GitHub’s, we are starting to create a series of integrations and scripts to facilitate our day-to-day work. We intend to share our experiences and improvements with the community, so follow Compufácil’s blog and Coderockr’s blog and we will keep you posted as we encounter new challenges.
