Having run several engineering teams (15-20 people), I used this approach extensively. It meant one less place to go and one less tool to use. I liked this approach so much, I also wanted to use Github Issues for internal and external customer support instead of having another help desk tool involved. I created https://hubdesk.io/ as a side project to do this. Forward your support emails to HubDesk and it creates a Github issue for every email thread. You can then communicate back and forth with sender by starting a comment with "@reply" to send a reply email.
I think anything that reduces the number of different places that information or discussion may happen is good. The thought of having a mix of code/code review/wiki/other wiki/email/chat/list archives/jira/shared inbox/trello is not appealing to me. There’s some continuum where adding a system changes things from good to annoying and I think my own feelings put that place more towards the “fewer systems” end than where other people put it.
Tool proliferation is definitely a problem, but at larger organizations I'm not sure how feasible it is to keep everyone using the same small set of tools.
At my last large employer I ended up putting together a custom search engine that searched across a bunch of different places where important stuff ended up - Google Docs and GitHub Wikis and Markdown-in-GitHub and Confluence and Salesforce Support and a mailing list archive and a few others.
Having a single place to search really helped: I had thought that we had bad documentation, but it turned out we actually had pretty good documentation just distributed across too many different places.
We used to use Unfuddle for source control and issues/PM then went to self hosted TFS but kept issues and pm in Unfuddle. Then we decided that was working so well for Dev, everyone should use it. But people didn't like Unfuddle. So now we have Asana. Everyone but Dev likes it, there's no ticket numbers, and it's confusing but at least the stakeholders are using it?
1. Would I have control over the "From" name and address for emails that HubDesk sends to users?
2. Do email replies from users get added as comments on the issue?
3. When an issue is created, does HubDesk send a confirmation to the user so they can do follow-up replies even before the rep has done an outward-facing reply?
For #1, Currently the response uses your custom email address as the Reply-To address, but the email comes from a hubdesk.io email address. It's on my list to add support for custom domains.
For #2, yes. You can go back a forth with the user just using commments.
The open source company im at uses Github Issues/Projects exclusively for project management, and I'm not a fan, though I do think it's the least worst option - using any other system would require a really weird and bad way to sync the issues that are reported publicly.
Github just lacks the few necessary to do project management well, I think. I would love a "backlog view" for Github Projects.
I would love a way to have a separate backlog “column” that doesn’t show in the Project kanban view. I’m keen to try out the new Issues/Project features when they roll out.
Love that the default is private and you have to add @reply to actually reply. I'll give it a try. Do you plan to make money from it? It's not super reassuring to start relying on it if it can get killed tomorrow. Also is there a way to restrict permission to a specific repo for the GitHub integration? "Act on your behalf" is a little scary as a permission.
Thanks! I do have plans to eventually charge for organization repos, but I need more installs to list a paid plan in the Github App store. So it's free forever for anyone who signs up now.
You can restrict the permissions to just one repository when you authorize the app. There should be a radio button for "All apps" or "Selected Apps". If you select the second one, you can pick the repos where to install it.
