[HN Gopher] Show HN: Tara - A smart and free alternative to Jira
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Show HN: Tara - A smart and free alternative to Jira
Author : iba99
Score : 141 points
Date : 2020-04-30 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tara.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (tara.ai)
| pj_mukh wrote:
| We've been using Tara for a while now.
|
| As a smaller team, we never had good luck with the hyper-
| complexities of JIRA, we were stuck with Trello (and/or a simple
| Notion Kanban board) for a while. But Tara's really worked the
| best for us.
|
| I personally, really like the personal dashboard for every
| developer on the team, flagging all your main tickets, PR's, and
| your teammates commits. I'm hoping for awesome things here.
| qznc wrote:
| That sounds like a more realistic description than "alternative
| to Jira".
|
| Jira is an Enterprise product which means it is designed to
| tick every feature checkbox any company could ever wish for. It
| integrates with whatever (Enterprise) ecosystem is around it.
|
| Tara sounds like "once you have outgrown Trello".
| pritambarhate wrote:
| Does it allow to export all the user entered data in structured
| format? So that moving out of it is easier if we don't like
| whatever pricing you guys decide later?
| beart wrote:
| Looks awesome and I would love to try it out.
|
| Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized'
| on Jira + other related tools. Now that the majority of work is
| being done through Jira, it would take a world ending event to
| move away, no matter how good of a product the alternative is.
| rexpop wrote:
| > I work at a large company... it would take a world ending
| event to move.
|
| What's your current Theory of Change[0] for how to affect
| decisions at a large company? Are you simply "paying your dues"
| and moving up in the ranks until you've accumulated enough
| political capital to make unilateral changes in the working
| lives of your underlings? How much does your individual
| organizational agility[1] figure into it? Are you, rather,
| content to let all decisions be made by higher-ups for the rest
| of your career? How do you suppose your peers model change? Is
| there any semblance of democracy?
|
| I am curious because project tracking tools seem representative
| of a whole class of stable, albeit local-optima that don't seem
| to change as often as they should, and as a company ages what
| changes are made seem to come increasingly from decision-makers
| far removed from the tools' impact on the Individual
| Contributor.
|
| As it's been said, "ambiguity is resolved by actions of
| practitioners at the sharp end of the system."[2]
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change
|
| 1. https://www.scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility/
|
| 2. https://how.complexsystems.fail/
| bberenberg wrote:
| Disclaimer: I run an Atlassian consulting company.
|
| In most scenarios I run into, "Unfortunately I work at a large
| company which has 'standardized' on Jira" translates into
| "Someone set up Jira poorly and now we dislike using it". The
| thing is that if you replace Jira with any tool you can
| imagine, the statement will hold true. Jira isn't inherently a
| better or worse tool than most others out there.
|
| If you're at an org where it feels like Jira is holding you
| back, and you don't see the org changing tools in the near
| future, the best thing I can recommend is to bring in an
| external team to show the org how to clean it up.
|
| Feel free to ping me if you need help (info in profile)
| Scarblac wrote:
| Or maybe the problem with Jira is that bringing in an
| external consultant is the best recommendation.
| bberenberg wrote:
| Depends on what your timeline is for changes, but you can
| also learn how to use it and do it yourself.
|
| My experience is that if an org decides to use <HIGHLY
| CONFIGURABLE TOOL> then they will do it wrong the first
| time without external assistance. This holds true even for
| popular tools like Postgres, AWS, Terraform, or even Git.
|
| Anecdotally, I don't know of any tool that is highly
| configurable that makes it easy for users to set it up and
| then scale it over time without learning the specific
| domain knowledge. Jira is no different in that sense. If
| you have an example of a tool that bucks this trend, please
| share it, I would love to play with it and see what I can
| learn about how to better serve users in this type of use
| case.
| qznc wrote:
| Large companies in many cases are systems in some local
| optimum of efficiency. If any part of the system improves,
| the overall system is worse off. Naturally, there is
| resistance to any change from the bottom. Change from the
| top is not done because they only perceive a cacophony of
| noise from below. Sometimes it is done in an existential
| crisis.
|
| External consultants are kind of an organizational hack. In
| contrast to top management they can take the risk of being
| wrong. In contrast to the workers they are not part of the
| inter-department politics.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| I think you missed the parent's "+ other related tools". My
| company uses Jira plus Confluence plus Bitbucket, which are
| each more or less shitty, but they are more or less
| interlinked. And that interlinking does actually add value.
| It doesn't matter whether Jira is inherently better or worse
| than anything else. It doesn't matter whether an _isolated_
| Jira installation could be replaced with something else. The
| network effect keeps us locked in as well.
| bberenberg wrote:
| I did not miss that portion. I wasn't addressing moving
| away from Jira. I was saying if you don't have a choice in
| tool, and you're unhappy, then the path forward is to make
| the experience less bad by getting someone (more
| experienced/outside your political structure) than your
| current team to help you.
| borkyborkbork wrote:
| Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket. By looking at their interfaces
| and how they are linked to each other technically, you
| would think they were made by different companies and
| hacked together after the fact.
|
| We just moved away from Atlassian to JetBrain's YouTrack.
| Huuge improvement in usability, system administration,
| cost.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Well, we happen to have a world-ending event on deck right now,
| I assume at least some orgs might be interested in something
| free with a similar feature set to Jira... (of course, if it
| wasn't also sadistically hard to use and configure that'd be a
| plus).
| iba99 wrote:
| Does a pandemic count? JK.
|
| Frankly- RN we're more optimized for smaller teams. We lack the
| admin/user control and SAML functionality that Jira has for
| larger teams. It should be interesting to see if new teams
| about to on-board Jira cloud find the heavy config and long
| load times annoying and consider making the switch.
|
| Majority of teams (for now) switch from Notion for sprints,
| Trello or Asana.
| mehmehmehmehhem wrote:
| I'm getting double flickers on some pages like
| https://tara.ai/about/. I'd totally switch over if there was a
| JIRA importer tool. I've used JIRA for years and would love
| something similar with a faster and less confusing UI.
| [deleted]
| Karishma1234 wrote:
| You do not have to convince me that JIRA is bad but once married
| to that creature it is hard to break that marriage.
| iba99 wrote:
| Hey folks. My co-founder and I started noodling on productivity
| tools a few years ago. After interviewing 250+ engineers and
| founders, we discovered that most project management software a)
| takes a lot of time to configure b) is not built for cross-
| functional teams and c) takes away focus from the release cycle.
| The status quo is that engineers spend precious time wading
| through tickets, and EMs + PMs continue to lack visibility at the
| release level. This only gets worse with distributed teams across
| different time zones, and as teams outside of engineering rely on
| product to meet customer milestones and release dates.
|
| Currently- the tool helps run and manage tasks, requirements and
| sprints. With team level insights and a smart indicator for
| sprint planning.
|
| This is our open beta. RN Github integration is live for PRs and
| commits tied to sprints- we're still working on Bitbucket and
| Gitlab.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >most project management software a) takes a lot of time to
| configure
|
| Every project management software will have some reasonable
| defaults that can get you started in no time.
|
| The problem is that every company (and certainly any company
| with more than a handful of employees), at some point, will
| want to adjust the tool to their use case and that's where the
| complexity comes in. If you can't adjust things like statuses
| and workflows, then you'll have issues with adoption.
|
| All the best, this is an incredibly crowded and competitive
| scene.
| m1sta_ wrote:
| On premise option?
| borkyborkbork wrote:
| This is key for us.
| Terretta wrote:
| It's a nice looking tool, but the marketing feels oh so very
| Enterprise Agile(tm) in ethos.
|
| "Run your weekly sprints on time" -- as opposed to them taking
| two weeks?
|
| To achieve predictability, something has to give. It's usually
| "learning" which is never on the plan.
|
| The next release will be done when the right top priorities are
| met well enough. When's that? You decide by prioritizing how
| many priorities are in the release and your bar on quality.
|
| Focus on execution? Why not on building the right thing, and
| building the thing right?
|
| The thing to manage isn't tasks, requirements, and sprints. The
| thing to manage is: "Is this team effective, enough to be
| trusted?"
|
| Meanwhile, a week takes a week.
| lifebeyondfife wrote:
| As a manager I follow two principles that help me to
| prioritise tasks for a weekly sprint.
|
| First, every project has three levers: budget, timeliness,
| features. Choose two. So it's not about not trusting the
| development team. It's about understanding the tradeoffs and
| how the delivery date will be affected.
|
| Second, how well can you predict what you can achieve as a
| developer in one day vs one hundred days? The estimate for
| the former is more reliable. Likewise the estimate of what
| you can achieve is more reliable in a one week sprint than a
| two week sprint. Being able to break fully deployable commits
| into smaller chunks (up to three days coding time) is a skill
| that gets better with practice. But sometimes you just don't
| know how long something will take because it needs breaking
| down and investigating. One week sprints are ideal for
| timeboxing investigations; here the output isn't software but
| discrete software tasks that fit in a one week sprint.
|
| Ultimately it's not about trust, it's about accountability
| and predictability. Sprint planning tools when used
| appropriately don't constrain engineers, but rather highlight
| the truth of how things are going.
| Terretta wrote:
| Sorry, teams can't be only devs. That's IT or something,
| and implies that tech isn't the business.
|
| Team has to include 'the business', as in, voice of
| customer, features lens, in those tradeoff prioritizations
| along with what do we engineer, and what's the truth of
| where we are on the field, for delivering what satisfies
| the customer and our constraints. // Hat tip Rands in
| Repose.
|
| As for "Ultimately it's not about trust, it's about
| accountability and predictability" that's precisely the
| characterization I reject. Accountability means you earn
| your keep by being effective. Predictability, well,
| milestones come and go, the software gets used forever.
| That's the predictability needed, which goes right back to
| effectiveness. You won't magic either of those in a Jira.
| discreteevent wrote:
| > every project has three levers: budget, timeliness,
| features. Choose two
|
| You forgot about quality. It can blow the other 3 out of
| the water.
| lidHanteyk wrote:
| Hi. I worry that this sort of tool does not benefit engineering
| very much; in my experience, Jira and other time-management
| tools are used to allow product ownership and management to
| request ever-sillier features, while penalizing engineers who
| do not make themselves legible with constant status updates.
|
| When designing Tara, how did you account for the power
| differential between the employees who will be using Tara to
| record their daily work and the managers who will be using Tara
| to supervise said employees?
| robotron wrote:
| I hope you've at least read the first page. It doesn't sound
| "like" Jira at all.
| lidHanteyk wrote:
| Could you explain more? Tara sounds extremely like Jira,
| both in form and function. The original poster (who is
| pointedly not answering my question, probably because it is
| painful and embarrassing) used "alternative to Jira" in the
| original submission. Other top-level comment threads are
| directly comparing Tara to Jira. How would you distinguish
| them?
| iba99 wrote:
| Painful and embarrassing is whenever I try to ride a
| bike.
|
| A few quick thoughts on this:
|
| - Jira started out as an issue tracker to monitor issues
| and tasks - it really wasn't built to handle software
| projects or the SDLC from the get go.
|
| -Setting up insights and reporting can be a pain. And you
| need to be familiar with all the jargon (epics, stories,
| burn-down charts). Overall, it's a ton of cognitive
| overload.
|
| -I used to just manage my issues on Github vs spending
| time configuring Jira. I only used Jira when the
| corporate overloads demanded it.
|
| Here's the take on Tara vs Jira.
|
| - We're zero to low config. There are entire 60 minute
| videos on youtube on how to setup sprints on Jira. On
| Tara, it's one click. We're really focusing on minimal
| functionality maximum impact in terms of matrix, and
| seeing how we can continue to be low config as we make
| the platform more powerful.
|
| - Insights are ready and built- in with no setup. Once
| your github is connected, you can view commits and PRs by
| sprints
|
| - We shipped our first smart indicator- it basically
| looks at your past few sprints (x>1 when x is no. of
| sprints) and tells you if your sprint has been
| overloaded. We're planning on shipping more smart
| indicators that make suggestions around effort, etc.
| munkay wrote:
| great tool - congrats on the open beta!
|
| it wasn't immediately clear to me that the product is still in
| beta, and was unable to find any pricing information which
| threw me off.
|
| another question - is there a reason why Github isn't a support
| authentication method, considering that Github integration is a
| big part of the product?
|
| But the tool looks super interesting - going to try it out and
| intro it to our team!
| iba99 wrote:
| Hey munkay- we're free for unlimited users. Principally, we
| believe teams shouldn't have to be limited by user counts
| when deciding which project management system to use. Most
| are still clunky and cap at 10 users for free accounts-
| planning to have a free forever plan for unlimited users
| (much like Gitlab).
|
| Paid plans may include functionality for enterprise teams,
| full fledged integrations and/or smart features such as
| automated sprint management.
|
| As for Github auth- that's coming!
| yboris wrote:
| Super amazing that you're aiming to have it free for
| unlimited users.
|
| I wonder if it's worth sharing prominently on the website a
| bit about the plan and an explanation of how you expect to
| fund this project.
|
| Without someone paying for the development it's not clear
| to anyone why this won't collapse and be closed in a month.
| siphor wrote:
| why the ai tld?
| iba99 wrote:
| Our first version (which failed miserably) was a prediction-
| only product with no workflow and a minimal interface. Here's
| what happened:
|
| - Initially our hypothesis was we could build data models that
| automatically suggested a specification or tasks based on
| certain criteria the user identified (for e.g. iOS app for
| video based calling). - The system would suggest programming
| languages, frameworks and a set of tasks based on the criteria
| - User would immediately reject the suggestions/predictions
| outright (even if they were based collectively on data from
| stack overflow and other platforms). This would be due to a
| number of reasons: 1) Didn't trust the ML models to make the
| right predictions 2) The predictions were their first
| interaction with the platform.
|
| As a result- we went back to the drawing board- and realized
| that to build a true "smart" project management system, we
| would need to start with intuitive workflows, and pepper in
| predictions over time based on usage and a team's actual stats.
| The AI tld stuck, plus we're planning on bringing the ML models
| to our public version soon. TBD.
|
| We also plan on using NLP for automatic task connect to Git
| repos/PRs/commits and ML for predictions around effort
| estimates. But - we're still some time away from the open beta
| on making that a reality.
|
| P.S. We recently acquired the tara.com domain which took 2
| years of negotiations. A story for another time.
| juandazapata wrote:
| I couldn't find the pricing anywhere in the site.
| pc86 wrote:
| It says "free" twice, in colored CTA buttons, in the first
| ~150px or so.
| chme wrote:
| Well it doesn't look like there is a non-profit organization
| behind it, so someone has to pay for that somehow.
|
| Is it support, ads or information?
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Saw this earlier[1], looks like they are working on
| enterprise features for larger teams, which will be paid.
|
| [1] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tara-
| ai#comment-1029087
| jyrkesh wrote:
| Yeah, and that makes it look like a lead generation button
| intended to get me to try the thing before I realize that the
| Free version won't quite suit my needs.
|
| I don't really care if it's a "pricing" page or not. The
| question you need to answer before I try you product is "what
| am I not getting by using the free version?" If there's an
| enterprise version in the works, tease me a little and
| "Coming soon" a bunch of enterprise-y features in a feature
| table. Just don't make me give you my email address, go
| through a confirmation flow, try out the product, and then
| tell me "if you need more than 1 user, click here to give us
| your CC".
| [deleted]
| yoz-y wrote:
| Congrats on shipping the beta.
|
| One thing that strikes me is that while you present your product
| as alternative to Jira, both the name and the logo (bluish form
| looking like an A) hint at Atlassian and Jira.
| cryptos wrote:
| What is the business model?
| macspoofing wrote:
| What else can it be? Per-user/month subscription. Probably free
| initially.
| cooperadymas wrote:
| How closely is it coupled with Github / Github issues? Would it
| work as a replacement for something like Zenhub, which is mostly
| just a facade over Github's own interface? Can you still add
| replies to issues directly in Github or do you have to do it in
| Tara?
|
| I would love to replace Zenhub, but almost every other tool would
| require us moving some key functionality out of Github. We still
| want to keep all of our issues, estimates, labels, and planning
| in Github's native issues, while also having some advanced
| planning and sprint features.
| derektwong wrote:
| Our Github integration is a two-way sync, so that you can
| import any open GitHub issues into Tara as Tara tasks. If you
| update the corresponding the Tara task, the corresponding
| GitHub issues are also updated, so you can certainly keep using
| the GitHub issues.
|
| The main benefit of using Tara is that it provides the team a
| much better way of plan upcoming sprints, and the system also
| pulls in GitHub PRs to eliminate any blindspots on PRs getting
| stale.
|
| I'd encourage you to give it a go and try it out to see if it
| works with your teams workflows.
| sngz wrote:
| does it work with gitlab?
| iba99 wrote:
| Not yet- it's otw!
| techntoke wrote:
| So no self-hosted option like Phabricator?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| As someone who makes this type of product, I tend to hate this
| industry. We make things far more complicated than they need be.
| It's all just ticketing software with labels changed and I just
| want a list of _all_ the tickets for me to manually filter. I 'm
| tired of companies thinking I don't know the best way to see the
| tickets I want to see.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I'm personally not a fan of ticket systems in general. They're
| often abused and simply turn into the worst kind of
| micromanagement and pressuring tools instead of simply acting
| as a tool for project management complexity.
|
| I'm not against these tools in theory (though Jira is a bit
| convoluted and overly complex for most simple projects) but I
| am against how they're widely adopted and abused in practice by
| businesses to enable terrible internal development cultures or
| perverse development strategies.
|
| These are the types of tools that when abused, lead to swaths
| of developers working 50, 60, 70+ hour weeks and burning out.
| I'd say they're more frequently abused than they are used as
| aides.
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