I have gone down this road and tried to use Jira, Trello, etc for project tracking for things other than my job, including hobby dev projects. After decades, I landed on text files in outline form (markdown sometimes for things like design docs). Way less clicks and page loads, way easier to back up, completely not dependent on proprietary/closed-source behaviors. I use them to take meeting notes, plan my projects, track deliverables/action items, jot down ideas for videos I want to make and mod ideas for games I play. Very effective.
This pattern works great with GitHub issues too - you can use an issue template, or just have a chunk of Markdown for people to paste into issues when they need it:
## Launch checklist
- [ ] Feature development and testing completed
- [ ] Documentation updated
- [ ] Release notes prepared
- [ ] Security and performance testing done
- [ ] Monitoring and alerting set up
- [ ] Rollback plan documented
If you put that in the issue description the progress through the checklist is then displayed in the summary list of issues as well (and anywhere else the issue link is shown).
I love sharing this one, I had a job that dealt with ingesting a large variety of data from different data producers, and data pipeline team had used jira or orchestrate the ingestion pipeline.
Create a ticket, add a label, attach a file, and update the ticket to "ready for processing stage 1". The ingestion pipeline would see the pending work, move it into an "processing stage 1 phase", loading it into a dedicated table. And then another system would move it to "processing stage 2" where it got processed into a second table. Then a manual hold stage, for the ingestion team to sign off on. Then another system would do a "merge" stage to bring it into the main database. The pipeline would be leaving comments with stats of its runs in the comments & updating fields on the tickets as it worked.
It was so cool & such radical visibility having core processes for the org run through jira. Both man and machine, collaborating to move data along. I've never seen a better more natural workflow engine than this homebrew system. Pipeline team had built something really cool, by basing their operation around jira & custom workflows.
Yeah I looked into this a while ago. You can't do literal checklists, but you could do a custom field which is a multi select checkbox. You can also set up automation to create subtasks on every ticket.
Cool thanks. I do wish Atlassian just implemented Markdown in a sane way across its platforms and also supported checklists as Github does. The latter request has been on their books for over a decade at this point...
