[mfisher87]

Yes.

My opinion is that nothing that currently exists really solves the whole problem of information management well (aside from git). Most teams mash together three or four different solutions for strongly related problems. Some teams are as bad as: gitolite for central code repo, a bug tracker for managing issues, a spreadsheet for managing who works on what features, a separate bug tracker for issues found in QA, personally-managed to-do lists for each developer, a Trello, a dozen bespoke reports for status to upper management, and all team communication goes through e-mail. Yes, slack and github would replace about 3 of these, but you still have 5 solutions to the same general problem -- what needs to be done and who is doing (or will do) it, how, and when.

Obviously this is a very hard problem, or it would be solved now. I have tried for a long time to decide what I think would be a good solution, and for all intents and porpoises, I have gotten nowhere.

I really like the approach Trello has taken -- provide a simple, flexible concept and let users build it all from there. Obviously Trello doesn't tick all the boxes, but I wonder if some other deceptively simple idea can accomplish it.

[iheartmemcache]

Atlassian is cheap (like a dollar a user per year, per product) for startups (up to 10 engineers IIRC - so lets say if you have less than 20-25 employees) and basically does everything from high level PPM all the way down to code-reviews. I've played with all of the major (and maybe half of the minor) solutions and Atlassian wins hands down. (They bought Hipchat, so you have your Slack integration -- Confluence as your wiki -- Bitbucket is now feature parity with Github -- and its all on premise. Watch this[1] 3 minute promo to see the tooling. And if its extendable/integrates into basically everything (see this: https://youtu.be/YdHtj0ymMqY?t=22. Oh yeah it has all those Kanban Trello features too). It was a RAM hog back in the day (mid 2000s) but thats a non-issue now. And re: licensing fees, if you make it past their startup-pricing, the software has delivered enough value to you that spending a few thousand an engineer a year is literally the cost of one day of labor for a FTE.

There are other alternatives with pretty decent ecosystems if you don't want to pay the $10 dollars to get 10 seats for Atlassian (which again, I think youd be crazy not to at least demo it). RE: OSS - Even with a "crappy" 8 year old Redmine install, you're given a git master remote to push to, a document share, bug tracking, and a whole lot more out of the box. GitLab also has a really integrated free set of tools which is a huge huge RAM hog in itself, but it's free and has eye candy so you can probably get management to sign off.

https://youtu.be/8KPoZ5g8NqU