GitHub Issues-only project management
Nope.<p>Having worked in a shop that used GitLab issues for project management, I&#x27;ve come to realize GitHub-style issue trackers work if all your project management boils down to creating and tracking bite-sized blobs of work. It stops being sufficient when you need to actually <i>plan ahead</i>. FWIW, so does Trello. Couple reasons why:<p>- Issues are flat. Work breaks down into a tree. And no, &quot;epic &#x2F; ticket &#x2F; checkboxes in task&quot; is not enough, that&#x27;s barely two and a half levels. Compare with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Work_breakdown_structure" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Work_breakdown_structure</a> [0].<p>- Issues are independent. Properly broken down, work in a project has dependencies. That turns a tree of tasks into a <i>directed acyclic graph</i> of tasks - work items depend on other items, often items from different areas in the WBS.<p>- Issues don&#x27;t schedule well. Most issue trackers I&#x27;ve seen don&#x27;t support simultaneously entering planned start&#x2F;end dates, actual start&#x2F;end dates, and actual work being done. This means they can&#x27;t be effectively used to estimate the length of the project, and update that estimate as the project progresses. Forget about any auto-scheduling.<p>There&#x27;s a reason why old-school PMs love their Gantt charts so much - they properly reflect the graph-like nature of work, and they let you see the information crucial for planning at a glance.<p>In my opinion, any system that doesn&#x27;t support entering DAGs of tasks with planned manual and automatic dates (e.g. &quot;this task will take ~5 days, and starts when that other task ends&quot;), and doesn&#x27;t allow you to compute the critical path, is not a project management tool, but a glorified TODO list. A good PM tool does what I&#x27;ve outlined above, plus it lets you easily run <i>what-if analysis</i> - that is, play around with estimates, resource availability, task ordering, to explore the space of possible project plans and possible failure modes.<p>So, in my opinion, neither GitHub&#x2F;GitLab issues, nor Trello or other Kanban boards, are useful for PM work. I&#x27;ve heard that properly configured Jira just might be. MS Project is a good one, if you ignore its clunky UI and propensity to randomly lock up for no reason.<p>--<p>[0] - Even where the Wiki says &quot;For most projects a hierarchy of two to four levels will suffice.&quot;, this is in context of &quot;lowest level of detail of the WBS should be longer than a single reporting period&quot;, which would be typically a month or more. Tickets in the issue tracker are thus <i>a level below that</i>. So, to properly break a project down, you need ~2-4 levels of structure <i>above</i> your tickets.