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Ah, we find the complete opposite.

One serendipitous thing we've discovered while using and working on Zapier is that the tool itself allows you to use whatever your best in class application is for the task at hand, regardless of what else you'll need to shoehorn into it. Zapier can help you connect up the different tools that are the best at what they do.

Multiple tools also help us silo stuff, for example:

    * Trello covers product roadmap.
    * Github covers bugs.
    * iDoneThis covers everything else we're working on.
Just like you might use a particular database for its strengths (Cassandra for write heavy loads, Redis for crazy fast in memeory, Mongo for speedy development), you should use various SaaS tools for their strengths.



We abandoned Github for bugs and only use Trello. The issue is that bugs need to prioritized alongside other work rather than done separately. Bug is a very broad term covering everything from a bona fide clear cut bug to 99.3% of some feature has been implemented but there is that missing .7%. Also Github doesn't support a 'priority' field for issues making them useless with more than a trivial number of issues.

The other problem is that Github doesn't allow multiple repositories per project (Google Code does). That means each project has its own bug tracker and wiki (we also gave up on them) and has exactly one source repo. If your final product experience is an aggregate of multiple different projects (eg an android client, a web server, a data backend) then bugs can easily be reported against a project when the fix is in a different one. Having to copy/move/reference issues across projects is far too much busy work.

The final issue was that I talked to Zapier folk and bidirectional syncing wasn't supported (and doesn't appear to be today). For example if it supported bidirectional sync between a Trello card and a Github issue then it might be manageable. (By bidirectional syncing I mean that changes made on either side show up on the other one automatically and there is no infinite loop.)


I think it depends on the size and scope of your project. As devs, we all start with simple text files + email for everything, and then add more specialized tools from there.

Complexity is endless, and depending on the scope of your project, it may not make as much sense to add more tools. I have met many people who just skip the entire bug tracking system and dump the whole thing in trello or somewhere else. But I couldn't imagine doing that on a huge project with thousands of issues and customers.




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