Too many tools on a small team: the cost is not the subscription
A second tool does not split the work, it duplicates the question. Why tool sprawl on a small team costs certainty rather than money, and the test that fixes it.
Blog
Essays on issue tracking, tooling and pricing for small software teams. The product shows up as an illustration, not as the point.
Managing projects in Slack: chat is a stream, work is a state
Slack is excellent at what is new and has no way to represent an open item. Which work has to outlive the conversation, and the one intake habit that fixes it.
Signs your workflow has too many statuses
A status is only worth having if somebody behaves differently when a task enters it. Five signs your workflow has too many statuses, and how to cut them back.
Kanban vs Scrum for small teams: what each one actually requires
Kanban vs Scrum for small teams, read off the two primary sources: what each really requires, which famous parts are in neither, and how to choose at 3–15 people.
How to set up issue tracking in an afternoon
Eight steps for a team of three to fifteen, in whatever tool you pick. The setup takes an afternoon; the rules that keep the board true are the real work.
Project management software for small agencies: isolation and access
Project management software for small agencies has one hard problem: keeping client work apart while contractors and client stakeholders move between it.
How to write a bug report that gets fixed
How to write a bug report an engineer can act on without a round trip. The usual failure is not a missing field — it is describing your conclusion instead of what happened.
Bug tracking for small teams without a QA team
Nobody owns triage, the same bug arrives three times, and the fix ships without anyone telling the reporter. What bug tracking looks like with no QA team.
How to migrate from Jira without losing the history that matters
How to migrate from Jira as a small team: what history actually means, what the export really gives you, and why most of it should stay where it is.
Asana vs Jira for engineering teams
Asana vs Jira for a team that ships software: where each genuinely wins, what the plans actually cost, and why their free tiers point in opposite directions.
ClickUp vs Linear for small teams: two opposite bets on configuration
ClickUp maximises surface area, Linear minimises it. A sourced comparison of plans, prices, views, issue keys and Git workflow for teams of three to fifteen.
Notion for project management: where a hand-built tracker breaks
Notion databases make a credible issue tracker, and two of the things people say they cannot do, they can. Where a hand-built Notion tracker actually breaks.
Trello alternatives for software teams: the moment the board stops working
Trello is very good at what it is. Here is the specific point where a team that ships code outgrows it, and an honest comparison of what to move to instead.
Jira alternatives for small teams, compared honestly
Seven Jira alternatives for a team of three to fifteen, with sourced prices and free-tier limits — and the cases where Jira Cloud is still the right answer.
What we left out of Kevta: no sprints, no reporting, no importer
An issue tracker without sprints or reporting is a choice, not an oversight — except for the two absences we are genuinely uncomfortable with. The full list, written by us.
How many columns should a kanban board have
How many columns should a kanban board have? Three, for most small teams. Here is the test for whether a fourth deserves to exist, the two worth adding later, and the one that is a mistake.
You exported the kanban board to a spreadsheet just to sort it
A kanban board answers one question well and every other question badly. Four signs you have a presentation problem rather than a tool problem, and what to do instead of exporting.
Being the Jira admin for a small team is an unpriced tax
Being the Jira admin for a small team is not a role, it is an interruption queue. The honest case for configurability first, then the bill nobody puts a number on.
Async project management for small remote teams: let the tracker do the standup
Small remote teams keep standup because nobody trusts the board. Two testable properties decide whether async project management can replace the meeting, and neither is a chat tool.
Project management for solo developers, and when a text file still wins
Project management for solo developers is pure overhead until two specific things are true. Which two, what to look for when they are, and the honest case for a plain text file instead.
Why we price Kevta per workspace and not per seat
Flat pricing is not a moral position, it is a bet with a cost. Why we bill $10 per workspace, where that is worse than per seat, and why Pro stops at 50 members.
Giving a contractor access to your project management tool for six weeks
What guest access actually means, what a contractor can see, what it costs to add them, and how to reverse it cleanly on the last day. With the member cap stated as a cap.
Flat-rate project management software, not per user: what each tool charges instead
Every flat-rate project management tool resolves the vendor's arithmetic somehow. Basecamp does it with price, Huly with metering, Kevta with a 50-member ceiling. The shopping list, each catch named.
Issue tracker free plan limits: what nine tools actually give a team of six
Nine free plans in one table, with the two columns nobody else fills in: the exact ceiling, and what specifically breaks the moment you cross it. Including the three that beat ours.
Your tickets are untrusted input: scoping the API token you hand an AI agent
A tracker holds private data, its tickets are written by strangers, and comments are an outbound channel. What a leaked MCP token can reach, and how to bound the damage.
The ticket is the prompt: how to write tickets for AI coding agents
Acceptance criteria were process theatre for twenty years because no human read them first. An agent does. How to write tickets for AI coding agents, and what to leave out.
How to manage issues from Claude Code over MCP
Manage issues from Claude Code over MCP: the setup command, the nine tools, the field-discovery problem every generic tracker MCP hits, and which verbs to withhold.
An issue tracker for AI agents is not the same thing as one for your team
Beads and Backlog.md win the job they were built for. An issue tracker for AI agents and one for your team are two jobs sharing a noun. Here is the line, and what earns a row a human reads.
Issue tracker MCP servers: which trackers your coding agent can actually use
Which trackers ship an MCP server, what auth each one uses, which plan tier it needs, and what an agent is allowed to write. Every row verified against the vendor's own docs.
An issue tracker for Claude Code: tracking work when agents write it
Agents write the code, review becomes the bottleneck, and the board goes stale in a week. What an issue tracker for Claude Code has to do differently once a machine does the work.
How to track developer progress as a non-technical founder
How to track developer progress as a non-technical founder without relying on a self-report: the merged pull request is the one status that exists whether or not anyone updates the board.
GitHub Projects vs an issue tracker: when free and adjacent stops being enough
GitHub Projects is free, already installed and sits beside your code. Three checkable conditions under which a separate issue tracker starts to pay, and why staying is usually right.
Why nobody updates the project board, and what to do about it
It is not a discipline problem. Nobody updates the project board because a status field is a second manual copy of something git already knows — and it drifts worst when the board matters most.
A git branch naming convention with the ticket number your tracker can parse
Nothing reads your feat/ prefix. The only segment doing work is the issue key, and where it sits decides whether your tracker sees the branch at all. The matching rules, from source.
Closes #42 only closes: what linking a pull request to an issue actually does
Linking a pull request to an issue with a GitHub keyword is a closing mechanism, not a status mechanism, and it is ignored outside the default branch. Three approaches, compared from source.
Update an issue's status on pull request merge, and which git events to leave alone
Update an issue's status on pull request merge and you have done the easy half. Which git events are worth binding to a state, which are not, and the guard that stops rules dragging work backwards.
Why small teams outgrow spreadsheets but drown in Jira
Spreadsheets stop working for reasons that have nothing to do with features, and Jira's real cost is not its licence. What actually sits between the two.
The quiet cost of per-seat pricing
Per-seat billing is a reasonable model that produces an unreasonable habit: rationing access to the tool your team is supposed to work in. What flat pricing changes, and what it costs.
What a five-person team actually needs from issue tracking
A short list of what is load-bearing at five people, a longer list of what is ceremony borrowed from larger teams, and a test for telling them apart.