Project Managers might just need some training. The board system in GL is very flexible and adaptable to how your org works.

I was really impressed.

YAY! I work on planning features at GitLab and Gabe from my team put together this overview view if any of you want something you can share with your team for training https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmASFwSap7c . You can also find agile planning tutorials in our docs site https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/tutorials/plan_and_track.html

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The problem with this though, is that commonly a requirement (ticket) does not map exactly to a single code repository.

I feel that it is breaking encapsulation in a sense to be dealing with issues at the repo level. The repo and the code are implementation details of the business requirements. The tickets describing requirements belong at the next level up of abstraction?

GitLab team member here.

One way to approach this would be using Epics [0], which can live at the group-level. Child epics and/or issues can then be used for more finely tuned requirements.

0 - https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/epics/index.html

I should point out that multi-level epics are only available at Gitlab's $99 per user per month level. We wanted to use them, but it's not worth that much. Jira is a lot more flexible and cost effective in this regard.

99 per user per month is crazy expensive IMHO.

And it's not just for developers who might be using the expensive stuff (git, storage, CI minutes). Also for members of the org who only use tickets.

There are issues at group / org level in GitLab that can span such tasks.

Also, you can create a special project to keep general issues (and use CI in this project to run Gitlab Triage bot to help you with issue management).

Hi there! I lead the product teams for planning features at GitLab. Issues at the group level are in the works to meet this exact need. You can follow the work in this issue https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/8308 . As always, would love to hear from you in the issue if you have feedback about the approach or have follow up questions.

Thanks for providing this info.

I do use gitlab-ce at home for my personal projects and think it's awesome.

I would recommend it to work in terms of its features for code management and build pipelines.

But I just cannot see any of our product management team wanting to use this for Roadmap/Epic/Task tracking at all. Its far too technical and too close to the code, both of which are things they have neither the time, interest or skill to interact with. Management are comfortable with Jira (and some of the extended Atlassian suite), as it hides the technical stuff away and allows them to focus on the management data.

I don't know what the perfect solution looks like though, and I also haven't spend the time to exhaustively try all the competing products either.

Hey `wdfx` GitLab team member here. :)

>[Roadmap/Epic/Task tracking] Its far too technical and too close to the code

I'm a Product Manager in the Plan stage at GitLab and I'd love to learn more about this impression. Would you be willing to share more either in thread or on a call?

Specially, I'm trying to understand what about the GitLab Plan tools (epics, roadmaps, etc) feel dev-centric?

One of the challenges of Gitlab is that the pricing does not work well in organizations where a significant portion of accounts would need to be non-developer roles.

With devs and a premium tier, this isn't bad... but the "ok, we need to double the user count and move from premium to ultimate, even though most people are only looking for multi-level epics and the reporter role." That represents a significant cost increase.

Taking all the devs from $29 to $99 and doubling the accounts is a lot more than $15 per account (devs, ba/pm/mgr, business).

This is a problem for so many SaaS development tools.

Github is fairly cheap, even at enterprise level.

MSFT also does volume discounts and if you have enough spend they'll give you GitHub for free when renewing VS licenses. I'll take GH anyday over Atlassian when it comes to collaboration.

There is no perfect issue tracking system sadly and integration with prs and commits actually is becoming a hard requirement for me. This is not something that people should be updating to an issue tracker manually, ever. Or doing without entirely (more common). Also nice in Github is the integration with Github actions and being able to see whether something can be merged safely or not.

I double as a product manager and CTO, meaning I do both code and planning. We're using Github issues and Asana. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. I'd take both over Jira any day. And since I'm in charge, my company is blissfully free of anything Atlassian.

I kind of like Asana for planning. It's got a few sane features one of which is separating issues from projects. This allows me to quickly plan out projects and then add tickets to the relevant team boards. And another one is making it very easy to create issues in a spreadsheet like view that minimizes the click bureaucracy other tools have. Great when you basically are thinking at the bullet point level and just want to hit enter instead of having to fiddle with obnoxious modal forms.

Of course for developers Asana isn't great because it has no markdown support and no usable github integration (a few commercial things exist but they are basically glorified sync tools). Github issues have a few nice features as well. I like working with check lists and then converting the individual items to tasks. That comes close to how I like to use Asana.

Where Github falls off a cliff is what passes for project management. I don't know what their PMs were smoking but it's just completely wrong and useless. It kind of lives orthogonal to issues (!!!!!) and nothing syncs automatically except with really awkward github actions crap. So, it only serves to add a lot of bureaucracy and busy work without actually addressing the core problem. A combination of over engineered and inadequate.

The core issue with Github is that issues are tied to a single code repository. From a planning point of view that is just horrible because I manage a product consisting of multiple code repositories and I need one plan that may involve zero or more code repositories and not several and I don't want to lock in my issues to a single repository before I have even figured out what the plan is. I guess that's what they tried to fix with their project management thingy. Except they messed that up badly.

I'd love a tool that is a bit like Asana but more integrated with pull requests, CI/CD, the notion of work being distributed across multiple code repositories, teams, etc. I don't mean yet another sync thingy that copies tickets from system X to system Y. I would like a one stop shop that can be used throughout the life cycle of a software product from before any code is written until users / customers start reporting issues and everything in between. Doesn't exist.