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I'm building a web app in a small team of two people - 1 dev & 1 product owner. I can't decide how to capture tasks and I'm wondering whether anyone has experience of doing similar who can make a recommendation.

Should I bother to use a formal project management tool such as JIRA (this is readily available, cost isn't the issue), or should I continue to use a less formal approach such as spreadsheet?

If anyone is able to recommend an approach, I'd be interested to hear what sorts of pros and cons support your preferred choice. Of course there are advantages to being in such a small team, whilst the development is relatively simpler than what can be supported with a larger team, I'm eager not to squander the advantage of being small by adding in unnecessary red-tape.

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  • Welcome to Software Recommendations! Please note that this site doesn't feature requests for product comparisions: SR is about suggesting specific software for specific needs you define. For details, see: Is tool x versus tool y a fair question? Also, this site is about software recommendations, not "best approaches". So please edit your post, list your requirements and ask for software meeting those, see What is required for a question to contain "enough information"?
    – Izzy
    Feb 13, 2020 at 21:15
  • @izzy thanks for your comment. Do you know if there's a more appropriate stack exchange to post this type of thing on? I looked but couldn't see anything more appropriate from what I could see.
    – goose
    Feb 14, 2020 at 7:18
  • Unfortunately not. Those kind of questions usually better fit on forums (where one can discuss the pros and cons) than on Q&As. But couldn't you rephrase your quesion along the lines "these are the requirements, what software would meet them"? Aren't you open to other solutions which might fit even better?
    – Izzy
    Feb 14, 2020 at 20:18

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I work in many small teams on many projects. We have Kanban Boards in all projects. Without them I could not work any more. You always have the overview who is working on what. You can see which tickets will not be finished for a long time. You can collect ideas and tickets in a backlog. That's all I really need.

In some projects we use Trello, in others the GitHub boards (a great benefit if you need the connection between tickets and code). We also had a Kanban Board with real handwritten cards (which I found very cool) - but that only works if everyone is working at one place.

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  • Thanks for your answer Markus - so from reading in between the lines, there's no team too small to need some kind of task management tool, you'd never use excel. I think I'm allowing for my natural tendency to reach for shiny tools, but it seems as if in this case a tool is a good choice.
    – goose
    Feb 14, 2020 at 7:19
  • @goose Absolutely! I even use kanban boards to manage my own life. So a one-man team in this case. I don't see where Excel could bring any advantage. For me the most important thing is to make the progress visible. With a properly maintained board, even a newcomer can get on and know immediately what's going on.
    – Markus
    Feb 14, 2020 at 11:34

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