[teampractices] Impressions about the switch from Trello to Phabricator

[Kevin Leduc]

Another Phabricator weakness relative to Trello my team noticed while
sprint planning is the lack of real-time collaboration.  My team could not
see the description I was typing into a task (ala eatherpad) and had to
wait for me to save my changes.  They also had to refresh their browser tab
to see changes on the task or workboard.



On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 2:35 AM, Steven Walling <swalling at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> I recently completed a bit of work to move my team's current sprint to
> Phabricator from Trello. I thought I'd share some of my impressions so far.
>
> - For reference, our Trello board is viewable at:
> https://trello.com/b/FdtPTV2y
> - The Phabricator instance and our team project is at:
> http://fab.wmflabs.org/project/view/27/
>
> *TL;DR* summary: I think the project management tools in Phabricator are
> just fine. They have some strengths and some weaknesses, like all software.
> For me the killer feature is having just one canonical place to talk about
> MediaWiki development. Consequently, I think embracing the full suite of
> tools (i.e. migrating from both Gerrit and Bugzilla) is a blocker for
> making it worth my time to abandon Trello.
>
> *Phabricator strengths:*
>
>    - *Task creation:* creating tasks quickly is easy from anywhere in the
>    interface. You can also get on a roll by using the "create a similar task"
>    function, or creating subtasks. This is on par or better than Trello in
>    some instances.
>    - *Dependency management*. This is a lot easier than in Bugzilla, and
>    definitely so compared to Trello, where the best you get is linking to
>    other cards in a checklist. Tasks automatically show all their
>    dependencies/subtasks.
>    - *Prioritization*: within a Trello card list, you basically have a
>    few hacky options for marking priority (labels, order within a list, or
>    creating separate lists). Phabricator simply has a field for this, and it
>    sorts tasks by priority by default. The colors based on priorities are a
>    nice touch as well.
>    - *Project overlap*: the nice thing about the Internet is that, unlike
>    in meatspace, one thing can live in multiple places at once. ;) Likewise,
>    in Phabricator, you can assign multiple projects to a task. So if I want to
>    make sure VisualEditor team knows about a bug in the Mobile version, or
>    there's a Core-related issue relevant to Growth team work, I can tag it
>    with both projects. I think this will encourage collaboration more.
>    - *Task assignment:* in Trello tasks can't actually be assigned. You
>    can only have card members and subscribers. We work around this by talking
>    about it, but it is nice when a task has a clear assignment, especially
>    when we need to work more asynchronously.
>    - *Reporting*: all the per-user and per-project reporting tools are
>    pretty nice, including the burnup chart. Right now I have to do this
>    manually in a spreadsheet.
>
> *Phabricator weaknesses:*
>
>    - *Sprint planning:* it's hard to separate out a current iteration's
>    worth of work from the entire task backlog. This is one area where the
>    workboards could be useful?
>    - *The workboard* (i.e. the board that is like Trello or a Kanban
>    board, viewable at http://fab.wmflabs.org/project/board/27/ in our
>    case). This is going to be the worst annoyance for Trello users who are
>    used to seeing an overview of the project via a Kanban board.
>       - To expand on this: the big problem is that there is no
>       correlation between the Resolved/Open status of a task and the status of
>       the task in a workboard column. For example, I can leave a task at an "In
>       Review" column I made, and also Resolve it. Resolved tasks are then hidden
>       from the workboard, and can't have their status updated. Example
>       screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/RfQrCMQ.png This means that if you
>       want to keep your workboard and task list in sync, you need to first go
>       manually update the workboard, then edit the task status. In other words,
>       maintaining a project workboard duplicates effort.
>    - *Editing tasks*. It sometimes takes way too many steps to get to
>    editing. I immediately missed Trello focus on direct manipulation, e.g. you
>    click in to a comment, task description, or other field and you're
>    immediately editing it. One simple solution might be "double click to edit"
>    or similar in Phabricator.
>    - *Attachments*: Trello shows the attached mockups or other materials
>    as cover images, and overall is slicker. Phabricator does have annotations
>    though they're not super usable.
>
> --
> Steven Walling,
> Product Manager
> https://wikimediafoundation.org/
>
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>
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