Indie Hacker - Development PM Tools?
What tool(s) do you use to help manage your software development process? How do these tools help you manage feature development?
What tool(s) do you use to help manage your software development process? How do these tools help you manage feature development?
I use ClubHouse: https://clubhouse.io/ . IMO, it has just the right amount of features you’d need to track software products.
Clubhouse is interesting, looks like a nice tool. Not overly complicated, while helping you get the job done.
Would you find a tool that allows you to manage feature development, closer to the code helpful? I’m building a pm tool for myself, which creates an integration into repositories and allows me to complete tasks and features through commit messages or readme updates. This forces me to take the time to plan features out, in detail, while allowing me to focus and stay in the code and not a pm tool.
Any feedback on the idea would be great. Like I said, I’m building it for myself already, just trying to determine if it’s worth opening up to other likeminded developers. Thank you!
Personally, I use Asana. For me, it has just the right amount of complexity for managing all the different aspects of my app in one place. Trello was also a strong contender. I looked at tools like Basecamp, but it didn't make sense for me as a solo developer (but I can see it being useful for a team).
In Asana, I use the "Stand-up" board layout and have a different board for the major sections of my app. My app, modelDBA, has two major components at the moment. A SQL editor that lets users visualize SQL as they type and a no-code database table editor. Each of those components has their own board. I also have boards for my marketing site and general app architecture features (among others). Each board is then sub-divided into smaller categories to keep things manageable.
As users suggest ideas, or I come up with them on my own, I add them to the relevant board. For each release of my app, I create a "Sprint" board, and use Asana's project feature to link tasks to the sprint, and mark each item complete as I finish them.
This has worked well for me, it keeps me organized and let's me prioritize feature requests across the different components of my app well.
Hope that helps!
Thank you for such a well thought out response, this is great. Asana looks like a great tool for a complicated development environment, such as yours.
I’m currently building a tool for myself, which brings project management closer to the development process. Essentially, you create a “project” or “feature”, which will hold tasks you’ve identified. To complete a task, you provide the name of the task in your commit message to the master or main branch. This would obviously require you work closely in the pm tool.
You can also create a readme integration with projects. It will create a new directory in an identified repo with a readme, which gives you a nice visualization of progress with your feature in the repo. You can still complete tasks with commits, or by updating the task in the markdown as completed.
My goal is to allow myself to identify all the tasks required in a feature once, while not having to interact with my pm tool daily. Is this something you would find useful? I’m trying to determine if it’s worth opening up to the world. Would appreciate any feedback on the idea!
Since I've already found a workflow I like, it's tough to say. Having some sort of integration that I could mark tasks in Asana as done from commit messages would be handy.
I think that your tool sounds interesting, especially for developers who are looking for something really lightweight. I'm not sure about your goals for the tool, but one consideration for a business environment would be how a tool like that could work for other stakeholders involved in development. That could be clients, product managers, etc., who aren't going to be working with development tools.
That said I think larger open source projects might find this really useful (both to track progress and show their roadmap). You may want to reach out to core team members of larger open source communities for their feedback.