A calendar for software teams
Your tracker knows what is being built. It has never once known whether Wednesday has room for it.
What the week actually looks like
The board is honest and the sprint is not, because the sprint was estimated in points and lived in hours nobody counted. Two of those hours went to a review that arrived on Tuesday, three to an incident, and the rest to meetings that were scheduled around nothing in particular. At standup everyone says they are close.
Where it goes wrong, and what answers it
Points are not hours and the sprint knows it
Estimating in points and planning in a tool with no calendar means the commitment is made without ever looking at how much of the week was already gone.
In UnaTask: Put the work on real hours before you commit to it, so the plan fails on Monday when it is cheap rather than on Friday when it is a conversation.
Review time is real and nobody schedules it
Reviews are the work that has no ticket. They arrive, they take an hour, and they are never in the plan, which is why the plan is always wrong by the same amount.
In UnaTask: Link the pull request to the task, see its status and checks on the task, and give the review an actual block instead of hoping.
Half the work belongs to people without a GitHub login
Design, copy, support and the person who has to tell the customer are all on the critical path and none of them are in the tracker.
In UnaTask: One place where engineering work and everything around it sit on the same calendar, without asking anyone to learn a tracker.
The dependency was known and still surprised everybody
Somebody knew the API had to land before the client work started. It was in a thread.
In UnaTask: Dependencies on a timeline, so what is waiting on what is a picture rather than a memory.
What software teams usually weigh this against
Jira
Jira is the standard, and for a team above a certain size it does a job almost nothing else does properly. Leaving it is rarely the right call.
It answers what is being built and never what your Tuesday contains, and it needs somebody to administer it before it fits.
Jira alternative for software teams
Linear
Linear sets the bar for issue tracking: fast, keyboard driven, and the GitHub integration is exactly what you would want.
There is no calendar in it, on purpose. Cycles tell you the fortnight. Nothing tells you the afternoon.
Linear alternative for software teams
GitHub Projects
It is free, it is next to the code, and if every piece of work is an issue it is hard to beat.
It assumes everybody is on GitHub, which stops being true the moment design or support is on the critical path, and there is no calendar anywhere in it.
GitHub Projects alternative for software teams
Notion
Plenty of small teams run engineering out of Notion because the specs are already there and a database of tasks is a half hour of work.
The database you built is a database. It has no opinion about the week, and keeping it honest becomes somebody’s unpaid job.
Notion alternative for software teams
Common questions
Do I have to leave my issue tracker?
No, and we would not suggest it. UnaTask imports GitHub Issues as tasks and links pull requests with their status and an on merge action. Plenty of teams keep the tracker for the record and use UnaTask to plan the week around it.
Does it do sprints and burndown?
No. If burndown and velocity are what you need, a tool built for agile reporting will serve you better and we would rather say so. UnaTask is about when the work happens.
What happens when a pull request merges?
You choose: update the badge on the task, notify the assignees, or move the task to done.