GitHub announced new Projects Beta, that is new version of the “old” GitHub Projects. Projects Beta (later PB) aims to solve the issue that Microsoft is currently having with GitHub and that is the lack of project management tools. Sadly this tool is not the complete solution, but it sure has some interesting features.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/devops-dojo-people-teams/
This picture is the best way to describe what is currently going on in the Microsofts DevOps stack. GitHub is used in almost every action except planning, where lies the Azure DevOps Boards. DevOps Boards is the only option currently in Microsoft stack to manage product development and planning currently, and so it will remain even after the launch of GitHub PB. First let’s see what are the killer features in PB and the let’s deep dive more into problems that it still has.
The Good Parts
First I have to say that the GitHub PB is fast. It is blazing fast and does not have any performance hickups. I think that the main killer feature currently is the grouping feature. PB users can group the tickets by any field and the PB will break tickets into groups that can be prioritized separately. This is very good for example when work needs to split into milestones, or when the work is split between multiple teams. Just group the tickets by milestone, or team and you are good to go.
PB is also quite customizable, at least what comes to issues. You can easily add and edit fields and add colors and icons for different purposes. These all brings nice clarity, when large amount of issues are viewed at the same time. I also like the ability to create views for different purposes. Creating own views for teams is a good approach to hide unnecessary tickets from another team.
One last thing that needs to be said is, that you can add issues from multiple repos into one project.
The Bad Parts
Life is not perfect and so is PB. There are two main issues that I’m currently having with it and the first is lack of workload. There is no support for any kind of workload calculations. You could add own field for workload, but that is just a number without any support from system. You won’t get any velocity number, sprint workload details, milestone forecasting or anything out of PB. The another problem is that GitHub issues does not support any relations. You can’t create features or epics and monitor their progress through GitHub itself. Of course you can use milestones for that, but again there is no support for workloads, so the milestones just tells you how many issues are open vs. closed. Locking milestones to epics also means that they cannot be used for anything else, because the milestones supports only one kind of view (for example if milestones are created per epics, you cannot create them for deployments…).
The lack of workload and lack of relations (or issue types) are blockers that prevents the main use of PB as only project management tool and using it as side, does not feel right yet. The benefits does not cover the usage and synchronization costs.
Summary
The GitHub Projects Beta is a good start on the road to a project management tool, but it still has a lot to catch up. I suggest everyone to wait for few product updates (maybe till the beta is over) and then give it a try. I think the GitHub Projects Beta is the correct way for Microsoft to move on with their DevOps stack and hopefully this project will be a success, but currently it is too beta for production usage.
Slight correction, Azure DevOps Boards is not the “only option currently in Microsoft stack to manage product development and planning”.
Long before and even to these days Microsoft has MS Project that is the main project management planning tool for ALL types of project, not just Software based projects. You can say that Azure DevOps Board is for Software project and MS might not recommend it for anything not-software related but i have seen people “bend it’ in many ways.
Main problem with MSProject is that its integration that used to be built in to vsts and i think early days of Azure DevOps was stopped and never resumed, for probably good reasons.
There was some “downtime” with MS Project in general in MS, but that went back up when they add MSProject as an office 365 option. Overall i don’t know how many companies had jumped over the bandwagon of MSProject, so thats probably why its so low on the radar and i wont be surprised it will eventually die, even though it used to be a flagship product where MS literarily wrote the books on how to do program management and then other copied into their pwn products.
Last but not least, Github project planning tools are FOR developers. Unfortunately developers don’t really want to mess with those things. The real audience for project planning tools are the POs, SWPOs, Scrum Masters, they are the one doing the planning, backlog and sprint log management, the ones that facilitate the retrospective and other scrum ceremonies. Trying to “teach” those entities to use tools meant for developers and thus limited to what is expected of such tools, things you see in Azure DevOps Boards and Jira is what Github and MS need to attend to.
What stands to te benefit of Github is that MOST of the Azure DevOps team, including the ones responsible for Azure DevOps Boards have moved into Github, and you can tell MS is trying to reduce effort or the rate of new features and placing a much bigger effort into GH. But if they continue to market this as Planning for Developers, no enterprise companies will move or what will happen that partially move and have to invest in 3rd party tool and use integration to keep things traceable and accountable.
Good points Arie and I totally agreed about that GitHub project planning tools are only for developers. There is no tools to support work of PO’s or Scrum Masters (lack of effort for example).
The MS Project has reach it’s ending, as the Microsoft Project 2019 is the latest version of Project and that’s why I didn’t count it anymore.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/project/project-management-software (end of page).
Microsoft has also a tool called Microsoft Project Online, but I think that is not fully suitable for software projects (because lack of integration). I havent’ used it so that could be a black horse in this race.
How about Project for Web (P4W) with Accelerators? Is that a good project management tool. Some third party accelerators even integrate with Azure DevOps and other MS tools..
I don’t have enough experience of it to give good advices, but usually the integration is only one-way which in most of cases is blocker. Also the attachments seems to be pain in the ass in most of integrations and giving away the ability to see attached screen captures etc. is something to think about. I think I will dig more into this and see how the integration is working.
One more thing about Project for Web is that, I don’t think it brings much on the table compared to Azure DevOps Boards and if I had to choose between those two, I would go with the Boards, because it has really strong integration with other Azure DevOps features + the new Develiry Plan features narrows the gap between planning tools even more.
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