16 Jun 2022
If you develop software professionally you will have a set of tools and practices that help you get the job done. If you have a side project then those very same tools and practices may not be best suited for your solo development.
Yes, they will feel familiar.
Yes, they may be free.
But using the big, team based tools you are used to carry a lot of overhead for a single developer. In your side project adventure you do not need overhead. You are going to be struggling to carve out time to do the work. You do not want to add the time and effort baggage of managing a Jira board in addition to developing or building a product.
Jira is a great tool for defining and tracking tickets. Jira is a great tool to use when working with other developers and team. When used in a company it provides management the ability to look across projects and pull out trends. It allows for tracking, labeling, and workflows for each issue. Teams can customize their own processes. Multiple people, and teams, can safely co-exist while tracking the work.
For a solo effort do you really all of this? The feature roadmap is a great tool because it saves you from making a similar document in PowerPoint (been there) or Visio (done that) or even Gliffy (yup, done that too). Do you really need a graphical, ghant-like chart for you features as a solo developer (or even a small team)?
In the beginning it feels good because it is familiar not because you really need it. You start to feel like you are making progress because you are doing the things that you do during the day, at work, with other developers, and other teams. The things that are required in the environment given the size and complexity of the communication channels. The additional overhead for your side project is not required. It just takes up time. It is hold you back from completing your project.
Here is the abandoned roadmap view for my project. It has not been updated in quite some time. Why? I don’t need it. The feature we are talking about can be tracked using pen & paper (fountain pen of course - LAMY Safari to be specific). The project could be tracked using a simple markdown file if I wanted. Originally I did not want to because I was a software engineers. Software engineers use Jira.
Do I really need a backlog? No. I need a place to keep track of bugs. If you are using GitHub or GitLab then you will already have an issue tracker. Just use that. Keep you issues close to your repository and forget about Jira for this project.
You don’t need big tools. You just need to get the project done.
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