86
dfox
8y

I hate ZenHub. For those who haven't heard of it, it's an agile project management solution that is hacked (and by hacked I mean really hacked) on top of Github.

It's touted as being convenient because you can have all your issues in Github and then look at them in epics and board format. Sounds awesome. Except it's not. For everything "convenient" it does, it severely lacks the most basic ticket management features that make any ticket management solution usable. Ex., you can't copy tickets. That's right - if you're creating 20 similar tickets, which I've needed to do in the past, you must create each one individually. New ticket -> add labels -> add assignee -> add title -> add description and then submit. 20 times.

ZenHub is so bad and so poorly conceived that many of those who use it have lost sight of project management reality and are blind to the 300 other PM products out there that are better.

True story: a couple of weeks ago people were celebrating because ZenHub added functionality to allow you to define what epic an issue belonged in while you were creating it. For those who aren't familiar with what that means, let me explain: before two weeks ago, when creating an issue in ZenHub, to fill out this "epic" field, you needed to first create the issue and then edit it to fill in the epic.

Let me break that down in devRant terms: it's the equivalent of not being able to add tags to a rant until you create it and then go back and edit it. Complete lunacy is the only way to describe it. And when they added the functionality two weeks ago allowing you to do it all in one step, people praised them!!!

Yeah, ZenHub sucks.

Comments
  • 2
    Is ZenDesk part of the same solution?
  • 17
    @oskaremil nope, completely different companies/products as far as I know. The fact that you associated them is bad news for Zendesk lol.
  • 10
    @kiwi989 I don't understand people
  • 6
    @dfox If you want to Do project management with github take a look at waffle.io.
  • 5
    might be quicker to code yourself a custom tool that calls Github's api?
  • 4
    Ironic that you posted this @dfox! For my final year project I've taken on creating a project management web app, and this adds to my research so thanks :)
    Github, and git in general, integration is planned for the product. Does anyone have any suggestions? Anything else which really pisses them off about the UX of project management apps?
    Thanks for the waffle.io one, I'll look into that.

    Also, thanks for coincidental topic of the week! Research has just become less invasive whilst still giving me the information curious about!
  • 1
    I was gonna say at least it has a pretty color scheme, but a cursory googling shows no relation to zenburn
  • 1
    I'm starting a 7 people team project for uni, do you have any suggestions? My team members actually suggested zenhub...
  • 2
    I suggest you get a smaller team. Uni group projects are the most hellish things you could attempt to conceive. Unless the members know how to work together well PRIOR to the project, or unless you're extremely lucky, or have the leadership skills of a king, then either get a smaller team or splinter.
    If you're not in a position to abandon, then know that there's at least one uni student here ready to help if you need it.
    As to management software, we've used Trello before because of its simplicity, but bear in mind this was with a group of novice web/graphic designers some of whom were reluctant to adapt to new or complex softwares. An interesting thing I saw recently in Github is that they offer scrum/kanban styled project views which uses the issues as cards for it. If you use git then I'd say why not make use of these features.
    I don't know Zenhub, can't comment.
    I've used Microsoft Project myself but wouldn't recommend for being used as group wide interface for project management.
  • 0
    @pily I love Asana! Give it a try...
  • 1
    @yalematta thanks, I'll try it out!
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