Thank you for the kind words - and the honest feedback! This are similar to thoughts we have heard for other users and we are working on better ways to give you more control over the UI in the near future
Congratulations to the GitHub team for a great release here on the new Marketplace. I'm Matt - CEO at ZenHub [1], one of the launch partners for the Marketplace. We've been building apps on top of the GitHub platform for 3 years now and watching the evolution has been amazing. The three releases here have really helped with our biggest integrator pain points:
GraphQL - better and faster access to data without hitting API limits
GitHub Apps - not having to ask users for so many permissions!
Marketplace - user acquisition targeted specifically at GitHub users
You can really improve the GitHub issue board experience with tools like ZenHub [1] - which is further ahead than the GitLab project management experience. This extra functionality is really needed in order to get the PM's buy in to switch from Jira.
The GitHub ecosystem will be the biggest hurdle for GitLab to overcome. (Disclosure - I work at ZenHub)
Using ZenHub also provides additional features like time estimation, burndown charts and Epics (for issue hierarchy) - we find that for larger teams, these are must-have features to work inside GitHub.
Our focus is going to remain on how to integrate a full-featured project management suite within the GitHub eco-system. The GitHub projects release will make a great foundation, and ZenHub will be there to provide the more advanced features like issue hierarchy (epics), time estimation and reporting. Lots of exciting releases coming soon for ZenHub users :)
Right now we are focused on getting the experience right in GitHub, but I agree that an ultimate solution must allow teams the choice of which source control system they want to use.
We get lots of feature requests for GitLab and BitBucket support so those are two likely points to integrate with next.
As a previous Jira user I have come across all the problems in this article. But the biggest problem with Jira, and all similar applications is that developers just don't want to use it - as a PM you either end up having to force a tool on the team or try and work from inaccurate data (which involves lots of asking for status updates rather than getting them async from the tool)
This is actually why we created ZenHub[1] to take this work flow to the makers rather than the managers.
We find this provides higher quality data and improves productivity by reducing context switching. Im interested to hear everyones thoughts about this integrated approach vs siloed tools like Jira. In my biased opinion the days of having a separate tool for this are numbered (see also the GitLab issue board release)
Congrats to the Gitlab team for pushing this out the door so quickly!
Back when we built one of ZenHub’s [1] first features — task boards inside GitHub — we believed strongly that development teams needed a single source of truth in order to move faster and communicate better. That belief has underscored everything we’ve built since. It’s awesome to see further validation for this philosophy here with Gitlab!
Awesome move by GitHub. ZenHub[1] will be phasing out our +1 button now that it's no longer needed – feels good to focus. We're excited to use this reactions data as part of our reporting suite, please keep the improvements coming!
It adds these features to improve the GitHub Issue tracker directly into GitHub.com, allowing you to:
- Display issues on a task board by priority and progress
- Attach any file type to an issue
- Add estimates and view burndown charts / metrics attached to them
- +1 issues to avoid excess comments
- Improved search functionality
- Link repos together to view issues that span multiple projects
Without having to context switch out to a separate issue tracker or UI
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Disclosure - I work at ZenHub, and use it with GitHub all day :D