Targetprocess Blog

> I've tended to view JIRA as "the worst of all project tracking tools, except for all the other ones" I've seen heard this opinion a number of times and I don't believe it's true. TargetProcess is a better project tracking tool. It has a deeper hierarchy for organizing work. It has the concept of teams built-in and allows you to view work across multiple teams and/or projects. It also provides a way to do roadmaps built-in. Everything is included and everything is designed to work well together. As for the specific criticism about not being able to get a high-level and low-level view in one tool, I think the reason why JIRA does poorly at the high-level view is that it has a very shallow hierarchy of work entities. It has epics => user stories => sub tasks. While projects can also be used to organize work, JIRA unfortunately binds the concept of sprints which is more of a team thing to projects. Thus it's difficult for one team to work on multiple projects or multiple teams to work on a single project. TargetProcess on the other hand has a separate entities for teams and sprints which allows projects to be used for organizing work. It also has an additional level in the work hierarchy providing the following levels: project => epic => feature => user story => task. This deep hierarchy allows you to group work into larger groups allowing you to see both the high-level and the low-level. https://www.targetprocess.com

I use Target Process for managing the entire development process. We're using Scrum as our process, and surfacing bugs within the same tool is a no-brainer. I like that I can identify bugs from changes (product backlog) effectively, and that I can take a bug and convert it to a user story if the scope of the bug justifies it. It also comes with a helpdesk that allows features and suggestions be fed in. In my opinion, whatever is handling your development process would ideally handle your bugs too. If the bugs aren't up there and visible as something you need to do before anything else then you don't have control of the quality of your products. http://www.targetprocess.com/ Requires .Net, ISS, etc. We have: Users: 7 Feature requestors: 8 Product owner: 1 Bug reportees: Thousands (anyone from any of the clients where our software is implemented). Used in the past: Trac, Request Tracker ( http://bestpractical.com/rt/ ), FogBugz.

http://www.targetprocess.com - project management http://slack.com - team communication

I've been using Target Process which is free for small teams - albeit not open source. http://www.targetprocess.com/

Still pales in comparison to http://www.targetprocess.com. It's unfortunate as many companies use Trello and as they grow they're locked into certain frustrating behaviors that create all sorts of painful workarounds and manual processes to cope. For example, it would be nice to have sub-cards, or the ability to break cards out into different pieces as is usually necessary with user stories with tasks. It would also be nice to turn checklists into their own cards, rather than creating a new card and then adding checklist from a different card. It would also be nice to be able to multiple select cards, move cards to top, move cards to bottom, etc, etc. I won't even get into reporting. I could go on and on. Anyway, these are definitely welcome improvements, but Trello for me is still far from being a really useful workflow management tool.

I thought this was hilarious, especially that on 'blame day' you couldn't defend yourself in Nerf battles. It left me wondering "Ok, what are these folks trying to do?" and then "Oh, he's one of the founders of http://www.targetprocess.com/ , I get it."

I've certainly experienced larger teams that have gone committee-like and are less self-directed. I've also worked with larger teams (4-12) that are not committee-like and are very self-organised and self-directed. So I don't think it's inevitable. I'm interested in teasing out the reasons some teams go one way and some another. Bigger than 12 or so - then the committee-like stuff seems to become more unavoidable. (Just read this rather interesting bit on how the process at TargetProcess http://www.targetprocess.com/articles/agile50months/ evolved. They have a mini-team per-epic - which sounds a bit like the best of both worlds to me)

- MS Lync for IM - New Relic for LAMP stack monitoring http://www.newrelic.com - Zabbix for infrastructure monitoring https://www.zabbix.org/wiki/Main_Page - Splunk for storing all syslog http://www.splunk.com - TargetProcess for agile pm http://www.targetprocess.com - burndown chart generation http://www.conceptuel.co.uk/burnDown (one of mine actually) - reviewboard for code review http://www.reviewboard.org

think differently start here: http://www.management30.com/ http://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/ http://agilecoach.typepad.com/agile-coaching/ http://www.selfishprogramming.com/ http://www.targetprocess.com/blog/ for product dev orgs: http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow-Generation/d…