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Created October 21, 2011 23:20
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Where Pivotal Tracker Misses the Mark
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Where Pivotal Tracker Misses the Mark

I think I'm ready for a new kind of project planning tool. Tracker has served me well for a couple years, but what I'm finding lately is that it falls short on the most critical component of project planning: the discussion.

Every feature is a discussion. Every bug is a discussion. Every architectural decision is a discussion. Discussions are everything. To paraphrase Joe O'Brien from one of his recent talks, I've never seen a project fail due to technical reasons, it's always communication. But looking at a Tracker project doesn't reveal the discussions at all.

Sure, Tracker stories have comments, but they seem to be an afterthought. There is so much visual noise surrounding the comments that they get drowned out. Tracker doesn't facilitate the in-depth back-and-forth that ultimately hashes out the details of a story, so what we end up with is discussion scattered across email, chat, meetings, and Tracker. Someone has to capture the result of those discussions in the story description, and that rarely happens accurately. Why not have a tool that facilitates and persists the entire discussion from idea to implementation?

Github does this really well with issues and pull requests. It's all about the discussion. There is very little noise. Inline images and code snippets are first-class citizens. But Github isn't going to cut it as a project planning tool. I want a hybrid of the two.

Does such a thing exist? I honestly haven't looked, and I'm curious what other people are using for their project planning. I hope you'll join the discussion below. After all, discussions are everything.

@cottsak
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cottsak commented Nov 13, 2019 •
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human comms is hard. discussions are hard. simplifying things is hard. finding clarity is hard.

no tool is going to do all of life's hard things for you all the time. sure Tracker doesn't have some of the "everything in one place" discussion features like slack or github PRs but that also may be by design? I can't say.

I would personally prefer to have the discussions distilled by some person (yes, hard work) and summarised into the description like you mentioned:

Someone has to capture the result of those discussions in the story description, and that rarely happens accurately.

It's the that rarely happens accurately that is the crux of your problem I think. Not the failure/feature of your tool of choice.

Just my 2c

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