Pre-announcing Fuchira (pronounced fooCHEERuh). The name is definitely going to change, but this is going to be my own personal project for the upcoming months and probably next few years.
The basic idea behind Fuchira is to create an open-sourced alternative to project management tools like JIRA (Fuchira gets the "ira" from this, haha), Monday, Asana, and etc. The goal is to create a free host it yourself version of the best parts of these services. I might be getting ahead of myself, but I would like to one day monetize on this by creating custom hosting plans + providing extra features through plugins, but also open up plugin creation to the open-source community wanting to make Fuchira their own.
One of the main issues that I have with most project management software is that there is a system of politics around how "Agile" and how JIRA might work at a specific company. For example, I've worked at places where where you were responsible for creating your own stories and managing a board of projects for your work. This was okay, but managing your sprint and upcoming sprints backlog of items as well as using the correct types of fields that upper-management wants can be a huge painwhen you need to actually do work. In most instances, I always wanted to just have a simple todo list to track work, but instead found myself spending time documenting "how I'm going/what I'm going to do" versus the actual task.
I've also worked at other places where project managers disaprove of you adding stories, have rules about certain how certain issues have to be in the current program increment "epics", want points/work estimates on stories before you start, and etc. I don't think developers should stress out any minutes managing tasks to this degree. There should be software to support spending more time in work and less time in software talking about what to work on.
Personally, I think the problem is due to the flexibility in most project management software. While one could say flexibility is good, I would say it's its curse, since it allows anyone, any company, or any organization to add their own rules on top of it.
On the flipside, very opinionated software could suck pretty hard if its "opinions" aren't good. This is the risk, but it also allows the tool to establish a particular process and guide a user through that process if the software is somewhat strict limited ways forward. If I'm able to create a decent opinionated open-sourced project management tool, then the rewards would be very high to the point that project managers + JIRA politics/self opinions could be eliminated out of the process entirely and anyone could make sense of project status at a given time.
These are just some initial thoughts. I have a ton more, but I'll share those in upcoming shortposts as I make more progress on an MVP. This will take awhile since I work 8-5pm, but my weekends will mostly be dedicated to this effort and hope to create something working sooner than later
Stay tuned!